I don't know if this qualifies as gentle reassurance, but right now this is all that stands between me and a Harley-Davidson.

Because I am an Englishman I spent most of my life in a state of embarrassment.

I'm fully aware that if I were to change professions tomorrow, become an astronaut and be the first man to land on Mars, the headlines in the newspapers would read: 'Mr. Darcy Lands on Mars.

I would rather five people knew my work and thought it was good work than five million knew me and were indifferent.

My singing voice is somewhere between a drunken apology and a plumbing problem.

My grandmother was a minister as well, which was not that common in the 1930s.

My looks aren't something that come dazzlingly through in everything I do. I can be made to look one way or the other fairly easily... I am still not recognised on the street that much.

I like playing strange characters. Some people might say it has something to do with a hidden part of myself, but I think it's a lot simpler than that: normal people are just not very interesting.

I think everyone is throwing happy stuff at you, and that's when you come over all humbug. It's happy stuff in your face, happy stuff is being sold to you.

Whenever you take on playing a villain, he has to cease to be a villain to you. If you judge this man by his time, he's doing very little wrong.

I always thought the biggest failing of Americans was their lack of irony. They are very serious there! Naturally, there are exceptions... the Jewish, Italian, and Irish humor of the East Coast.

For all those people, who took advantage of my kindness. Thank you. I won't drop to your level. I'll simply smile and move on.

My thoughts are whirled like a potter's wheel

Money is a terrible blab; she will betray the secrets of her owner, whatever he do to gag her. His virtues will creep out in her whisper; his vices she will cry aloud at the top of her tongue.

The thing that I am most passionate about would be acting.

I never stop being a mother and I never stop being an artist. You understand? Which is probably why my kids are so creative, because it’s not separated.

Grief reconfigures time, its length, its texture, its function: one day means no more than the next, so why have they been picked out and given separate names?

Faith is something a lot of people relate to as a God-thing, but it's also faith in yourself.

I can't take the theater side out of myself.

It is a proof of philosophical mediocrity, today, to look for a philosophy.

People do terrible things all the time, but we don’t regularly disown our humanity. We disavow the terrible things.