What tends to happen in most movies is that strip clubs are used as a short hand for unsympathetic, sleazy people. And that's just a lazy cliché.

I did not become successful in my work through embracing or engaging in celebrity culture. I never signed away my privacy in exchange for success.

If you chase something too desperately, it eludes you.

When I was a student I was very, very ambitious, completely immersed in my comedy career. I never had that period of reckless hedonism that you should get out of your system in your youth.

I don't like big feet. It reminds me of gammon.

If things don't come easy to you, you have to pull a rabbit out of a hat.

Me, myself, personally, I like to keep myself private. I have never said I am a paragon of virtue, a model of morality. I simply do what I do.

The truth is somewhere in the middle of funny and serious.

The trick is always to write in pairs because if at least two people find it funny, you've immediately halved the odds of it not being funny.

I think if you try to look for something to show off as an actor, vanity can get the better of you.

I am of the very last generation who didn't have computers at school. As we grow old we'll become something of an aberration.

So long as we are brave enough to accept the consequences of our actions, no one can take away our freedom of choice.

Clearly, imagining cannot be expected to mean exactly the same thing today as it did in the Middle Ages or antiquity. For one thing, Aristotle and Aquinas never watched television.

I tell so many lies, sweetheart," he said. "which one specifically?

I stopped worrying about being desired a long time ago.

Begin doing what you want to do now. We are not living in eternity. We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand - and melting like a snowflake.

The most important survival ability for any life form is the ability to change.

I think many years ago I got on a bus in L.A. and drove around to see the stars' homes, but that's the extent of my direct experience in Hollywood.

Because artists can be extremely eccentric and insane, and unfortunately, the people they hurt the most are the people that are closest to them.

Without mercy, we have little chance nowadays of becoming part of a world of 'wounded' persons in need of understanding, forgiveness, love.

It's great to hear someone really care for the soprano saxophone.