The effort of learning. It's the same when you approach any new skill or technique, from a dance step to driving a car. The effort of learning stops you, at first, from doing it well.

Life is just more comfortable if you're honest and open about everything. I spent so many years being in the closet about one thing or another.

Most of my career has been spent with the RSC doing Shakespeare, and the thing you learn from Shakespeare is that his historical plays don't bear anything other than a basic resemblance to history.

What drew me to acting in the first place was disguise.

I can feel the power of the words doing the work. Must trust language more.

I have a Woody Allen Jewish attitude to life: that it's all going to be disastrous. That it hasn't all been that way is simply down to some random quirk of fate.

It's good for actors to confront those things we have to act: panic, pain and death.

I don't believe in an afterlife.

I feel so sorry for younger actors who aren't able to have the opportunities that I had, starting out in repertory theatre. It's really tough on young actors now.

When I'm painting and drawing I only do people. Acting is obviously portraiture - and writing is as well.

The whole of my acting career is a bit of a mystery to me.

Like as a young child may not bring forth the things that belong to the aged, even so have I disposed the world which I created.

I finally understand. Cancer is not a gypsy curse. It's a huge smashing wave. It catches you and drags you out. And anybody can be spit back up, and anybody can drown. -The Lucky Place

Whose Daddy's Little Girl Now?

Success is not greedy as people think but insignificant. That's why it satisfies nobody.

...I should have people around bugging me and getting under my skin because without people I could not grow - I could not grow in God, and I could not grow as a human.

Jericho Barrons was my poison now.

I would never say one was more important or more gratifying than the next because there's a tremendous amount of work, as you know, that goes into winning a cup.

Heaven forbids, it is true, certain gratifications, but there are ways and means of compounding such matters.

Talk when you talk, walk when you walk, and die when you die.

When the belly is empty, the body becomes spirit; and when it is full, the spirit becomes body.