I'd like to win a Booker Prize for writing. A Nobel Peace Prize for my work in peace... and I think that'll probably do.

I loved going surfing down on Venice Beach. Id go out with a board under my arm and think, I cant do that in Cranhill.

After I've been in America for a while, I get homesick for Scotland.

Rather than thinking, 'If I do this, and in five years I'll be where I want to be,' you're better just doing something that makes you happy now.

My worst habit is whistling while I sleep.

I'd be lying if I said it wasn't fun to go to these nights out, like the opening of a film or something, but I dip in and out of it.

I think Scotland has some great stories.

But you talk to most filmmakers and it is six, seven, eight years trying to get things off the ground. It is incredible really.

He [Viggo Mortensen] was standing behind the camera throwing the apples … And I’ve never seen him so happy.

Hobbits are a lot like Scots. It’s all about nature and enjoying their land, which is a very Scottish thing.

Sometimes the songs you think will be best don't turn out to be best.

God is the Wonderful Counselor.

Your heart is too magnificent for a small hope

The need to be right all the time is the biggest bar to new ideas. It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong than to be always right by having no ideas at all.

To my way of thinking and working, the greatest service a piece of fiction can do any reader is to force him to lay it down with a higher ideal of life than he had when he took it up.

I like the fact that I'm living in the world rather than in a university.

The right of conquest has no foundation other than the right of the strongest.

Real, rough and rugged, shine like a gold nugget, Every time I pick up the microphone, I drug it.

It's one thing to make a choice. It's another to put that choice into practice.

Being in the depths of sadness is just as important an experience as being exuberantly happy.

It's my first presenting role so I'll be nervous, but it's going to be great fun. I can't wait to sample the food and meet the celebrities. Hopefully I can inject some of my own glamour.