I put £150,000 into the stage production of Grease and have got back £1.5 million so far. It has been a fantastic success.

Some people standby you in your darkest hour while others walk away; only a select few march towards you and become even closer friends.

I have discovered with advancing years that few things are entirely black or white, but more often different shades of grey.

I feel I have had a very interesting life, but I am rather hoping there is still more to come. I still haven't captained the England cricket team, or sung at Carnegie Hall!

If you make a deal with a fool, don't be surprised when they act foolishly.

Time spent on preparation is seldom wasted.

Making a million legally has always been difficult. Making a million illegally has always been a little easier. Keeping a million when you have made it is perhaps the most difficult of all.

What I have found is that real friends stand by you.

While there may not be a book in every one of us, there is so often a damned good short story.

we all suffer in our different ways from being prisoners of birth.

When I was three, I wanted to be four. When I was four, I wanted to be prime minister.

Someone else deciding what was too dangerous for me to be involved in or pursue had never stopped me yet.

I do just want to be an actor. The thing I get out of it is actually doing the job and inhabiting the world and the role - and I mean that genuinely. That's what I'm in it for.

At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst.

Here Skugg lies snug As a bug in a rug.

I love music, from shanty sea-songs to Calvin Harris.

All disease begins in the gut.

A sannyasin has to relax to that total state of let-go when everything happens and nothing is done.

It is the job of the historian to say what is likely, and of faith to say what is possible.

The child which overbalances itself in learning to walk is experimenting on the law of gravity.