I'm not as self-destructive as Dylan Thomas, but I've certainly been around that behavior enough to have found it a release. The thing that I really enjoyed was being able to play misery.

I prefer to be flippant about acting, just in case I'm rubbish.

Nothing else is as fulfilling as playing a part in which you are able to have a significant say in the creative process all the way through. How many actors get to do that? It's extremely rare.

For me, faith is more about aspiration than complacency - the smug satisfaction that other people find distasteful.

I like to think of myself as versatile, and I certainly have the most varied career, so I'm very, very lucky in that.

I'm on the verge of taking a stand.

Stories about vicars are always being told because they're at the heart of our society. Vicars touch all parts of the community and see life in all its extremity.

Obviously I'd love to have kids and all that. Luckily, as a man, there's not such an egg timer on it, but I'd like to be able to pick them up without Nurofen first.

I'm unhappy as Dylan Thomas was, because I'm not, but I've had my brushes with sadness.

Somehow I find it easier to inhabit characters if they are a little bit pathetic. I do seem to have an affinity with pathetic people.

If you're actually being paid to be miserable, and to be as miserable as you can be, that's a very fortunate thing, if you're prone to occasional lapses of spirit.

How easy it is for us to demonise from a distance. But when we stand face to face with our supposed enemy, it is hard to hate.

I was soon drawn to the Republican Party because I realized that it truly, not just rhetorically, believed in equality.

Leadership is helping yourself and other people achieve goals. The ability to direct your life to get the results you want is leadership.

Learn, as if never overtaking your object, and yet as if apprehensive of losing it.

When you see these people that are in the public eye all the time, it must get tiring.

Her handwriting was curious — small sharp little letters with no capitals (who did she think she was, e. e. cummings?).

Sometimes you have to do the things that scare you and that are outside of your comfort zone and challenge yourself.

Christianity is the root of all democracy, the highest fact in the rights of men.

We're both [with Mark Wahlberg] capable of being sarcastic, vicious, violent lunatics, but we hold each other in check, appeal to the best aspects of each other.

Again, it is belief without evidence. In the case of Stalinism, people actually distorted science, because it was for the good of the Communist Party.