The elderly are all someone's flesh and blood and we cannot just shut them in a cupboard and hand over the responsibility for taking care of them to the state.

To enter a theatre for a performance is to be inducted into a magical space, to be ushered into the sacred arena of the imagination.

To live another person's life is quite a weird thing.

When the BBC decided to bring Doctor Who back as a feature film a few years ago, one national newspaper ran a poll to ask its readers who should be the new Doctor, and I topped it.

Childhood didn't have a big influence on me, really - in fact I spent most of it plotting how to escape.

I've come to this conclusion: What makes a great actor is great need. A huge need of acting.

My mother wanted me to be a teacher. She had this vision of me walking across the quadrangle in an Oxford college wearing my academic gown.

I am never bored, never short of anything to do and I don't even ever feel lonely. I am quite gregarious and I get out and about a lot, but sometimes it is just wonderful to be on your own.

Having caught a glimpse of what I might be able to do with my talent, I feel a tremendous obligation to try to fulfill it.

Everything that we have gone through, are going through, and will go through is there in Shakespeare. It is all of human life.

Like many Catholics, I was very affected by the personality of Jesus and that impression, pious as it was, has stayed with me.

Sometimes a man cannot live up to the best idea they dared to have

Death makes life precious. Without it nothing would mean anything. Imagine a society without death

I drank through the buzz of befuddlement into perfect clarity and out again into the blissful confusion of true intoxication.

In English every word can be verbed.

In a world of moral certainty, the unthinkable becomes permissible.

If our core belief is based on what other people think, then we eventually will allow their opinions to become our reality.

I realize more and more how instinctively pessimistic I am of all human kindness -- since I am always so bowled over by it -- and am never surprised by injustice, malice or personal attack.

It is about the greatness of God, not the significance of man. God made man small and the universe big to say something about himself.

How can the moribund old man reason back to himself the romance, the mystery, the imminence of great things with which our old earth tingled for him in the days when he was young and well?

We may not substitute charity for godliness; but there is room for the Divine love in the heart which has been touched by the human.