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

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.

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 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.

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.

Every human being is equally wealthy according to God’s divine providence.

It wasn't that she lit up, but that everything else seemed to dim. Things he thought were important or bright turned out not to be when she was around, when they were held up against her glow.

Mother Earth allows us to live and to walk on her surface, not the other way around.

Out of the decisions that we make in life, our Self emerges. What we choose in life is not the thing chosen out there, but oneself.

To halve the number of times that other people hurt you: halve the number of expectations that you have from other people.

Primarily, every rule change over the past ten years has been against the pitchers - lowering the mound and the designated hitter.

Prayer, in it's simplest form, is finding out what God wants to do and then asking Him to do it.

I've served my country.

The Feast of Fortuna had nothing to do with tuna, which was fine with Percy.

When literature becomes deliberately indifferent to the opposition of good and evil it betrays its function and forfeits all claim to excellence.