As you get older you feel you need to pay more attention to what is around you and relish it. I'm greedy for beauty.
If you ever see me in a social setting wearing any sort of sportswear, then you know I'm in crisis.
I find it hard to relax around any man who's got the second button on his shirt undone.
One of my great regrets, and I don't have many, is that I spent too long putting people's status and reputation ahead of their more important qualities. I learned far too late in life that a long list of letters after someone's name is no guarantee of compassion, kindness, humour, all the far more relevant stuff.
When people warned me there would be long periods out of work if I became an actor, I couldn't keep a straight face because that was exactly what I had in mind.
I would like to change everything, but obviously not everything. I've been incredibly fortunate. I guess everybody would do this, but I'd go back to my younger self and say, "Lighten up. Take it easy. Relax. Don't be so anxious about everything. Try to be in the day. Try to not have today stolen from you by anxiety about yesterday or tomorrow."
Actors always talk about taking their work home and I always think: 'What are you on? You just turn it off. You are at work and then you go home.'
I used to think that prizes were damaging and divisive, until I got one, and now they seem sort of meaningful and important.
I'm not a financial expert. The Robin Hood tax seems to me a very simple and beautiful idea. I don't see the problem.
I have a perfectly average skewed perception of myself. We often don't know what we're like.
I did actually sit down with a blank sheet of paper once. I think the phone rang and that was the end of my literary career.
If I ruled the world, every woman would have a Chanel suit in her wardrobe.
Never go anywhere you have to wear brown shoes.
One of the great regrets of my life is that I smoked. If I could say anything to anybody starting out in life it would be, 'Whatever you do, don't smoke'. I have had to recover from that and been lucky that I have been able to stop.
I never go on the net or the web, or whatever it's called.
I'm relaxed naked as long as there is no one else there. I speed up past mirrors.
I'm just aware of what I'm thinking and feeling but I do obviously have to get that to the back of the auditorium. So there are things like projection and filling the room, and not dropping the ends of lines - technical things which are important, but I don't think they change the way I feel in a scene.
I used to joke that one of the reasons there was a lack of classical work on my CV was because I couldn't operate in those kinds of trousers. Which is a joke, but it's actually also true - if I want to appear in public I want to look my best. If I'm onstage I like to do contemporary work, largely because of the trousers, because of the clothes. I like a decent, what we used to call a lounge suit. Then I can start to motor.
There is something, yeah, I mean traditionally it's more fun to play bad guys than it is good guys and when you're playing a bad guy, yeah, the fun in it is to see how scary you can be, how horrible you can be. And it's surprising what you come up with.
You have all these plans to act, and maybe do it rather elegantly, and then they turn the rain machine on.
I have nothing against romanticism. I'm all for it. I'm helpless in the face of romance.
The way the elderly are treated, and in some cases warehoused and medicated, rather than nurtured and listened to, is distressing.
I did pick up a guitar once, but the strings hurt my fingers so I put it down again.
The degree of notoriety I have is fine and easy. There's nothing hysterical about it.
If I'm going to appear in front of people I like to look my best.
