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

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.

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.

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

I am the truth, since I am part of what is real, but neither more nor less than those around me.

You must be a blessing to other people while you are still on this earth

The Majesty of the Maker!

I want you alone, " he whispered, gliding a hand around her hip, "on a slow boat to China. Days together, nights... rocking on the waves.

Tomorrow is a satire on today And shows its weakness.

Van Gogh is the best example of how a person can be on the right track, propelled by gut feeling and some kind of strange obsessive stubborn conviction, that no one seems to understand.

Sift each of us through the great sieve of circumstance and you have a residue, great or small as the case may be, that is the man or the woman.

My ego only needs a good rhythm section

The truth of the matter is that although not all Muslims are terrorists, unfortunately, in today's world, most of the terrorists - 99 per cent - are Muslim.

People at the top are closing ranks so tightly that all possibility of subjective deviation has gone, and difference can be sought only in the more distinguished cut of an evening dress.