I meet people who are famous, and it's made me realise that fame has huge lifestyle disadvantages. I'm nervous about that. I don't want to become a celebrity.

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.

The effectiveness of your life is not determined by the duration of your life

Ideas must work through the brains and the arms of good and brave men or they are no better than dreams.

During this period at the Department of Education, my working relationship with Judge Thomas was positive.

Four months is a lot of living with that little life in you - thinking about it, eating right for it, nurturing it and all of a sudden, it dies.

If you consciously send negative energy toward someone, then what you send is exactly what you will attract upon yourself in your own life.

If the way to do good to my country were to render myself popular, I could easily do it. But extravagant popularity is not the road to public advantage.

While all men seek after happiness, scarcely one in a hundred looks for it from God.

I am the ocean we lived on for two months. I am empty. I am nothing.

If the United States marches into Iraq without the backing of the United Nations, that will be done entirely without the backing of the American people.

Self-awareness is one of the rarest of human commodities. I don't mean self-consciousn ess where you're limiting and evaluating yourself. I mean being aware of your own patterns.