Two years ago, I shot 'Pillars of the Earth' in Budapest - it was a big part, but I had a lot of time to sit around and visit cafes.

Up there on the screen, we can all fly. But down here on earth, we need to be each others wings.

I walk around talking to myself in accents. Usually people look at me like I'm a complete fruit loop.

I'm as voyeuristic and intrigued as the next person as to how celebrities live.

Learning lines is hard for me because I have the attention span of a six year old. That's why being on planes all the time is so useful - I'm forced to learn out of boredom.

The fear of messing up is what makes you work harder!

I always try to describe making movies like summer camp, or some holiday where you spend all day, every day with a new group of people whom you kind of love and then never see again.

You never know what's right, what you feel inside versus what is portrayed.

I love the Potter films. I found them the most wonderful sort of escapism every year or two.

They're such hierarchical things, film sets, they're sort of mini societies. Often they're incredibly political places.

It can be a miserable profession, acting, because you always want what you can’t have.

The most important thing in life is to dare. The most complicated thing in life is to be afraid. The smartest thing in the world is to try to be a moral person.

Authors always take rejection badly. They equate it with infanticide.

Life proceeds, it enrages. The untouched ones spend their luck without a thought, believing they deserve it.

The most dangerous silence is noise; noise keeps us from hearing what we need to hear or from speaking what we need to speak.

I have never tried [cocaine] in my entire life. I've never even seen it. ... I am also way too high-strung. I can't even take a Sudafed. Can you imagine? My God. I think my heart would explode.

I don't think I can be intimidated about working with any comedic actors. It felt great to get to play hardball with the big boys as they say.

A friendship counting nearly forty years is the finest kind of shade-tree I know.

The great curse of modern political life is incrementalism.

Double - no, triple - our troubles and we'd still be better off than any other people on earth.

Quote: What angel wakes me from my flowery bed?