I think what 'The Hobbit' and Middle-earth deal in are quite universal and timeless themes of honour and love and friendship... so they're things that do resonate with people.

Being a mod is more of a sensibility than a style.

You could say I'm a mod, but with a small 'm'; I don't wear a parka, but I do question what I wear and what I listen to, which is what it's all about.

Name anything - high-definition TV, computer obsolescence - and I'm pretty much annoyed by it.

I'm not posh or common, I'm in between.

I love that pre-mod jazz look of the late Fifties, the Steve McQueen style that influenced the British modernists.

Most people have a passive relationship with music and clothes, with culture. But music was my first contact with anything creative. Music is it, as far as I'm concerned.

I've got a stag weekend coming up and I've said I'm not doing anything more than a few drinks. I won't have it. I'll go home and watch Antiques Roadshow.

I hate the fact that so much of our life is computerised rather than mechanised.

True heroics, obviously, is not the absence of fear, but having that fear and doing something anyway.

Sherlock and Watson are a love story

We must experience certain things in life, even in our childhood, so we can later look back and value the journey.

Respect the masterpiece. It is true reverence to man. There is no quality so great, none so much needed now.

Though there is growing division among the Ukrainian military ranks as to loyalty in this revolution, the possibility of violence looms over the entire situation.

I've always said that I worry about being with a man who doesn't flirt.

But it is not really difference the oppressor fears so much as similarity.

What I do and what I dream include thee, as the wine must taste of its own grapes.

I think there has to be a recognition that, you know, there's so much at stake now, I mean, the business has changed so much and decisions are made so quickly, in nano seconds basically.

It turns out that, somehow, there are a tremendous number of things to be optimistic about.

Man is the only one that knows nothing, that can learn nothing without being taught. He can neither speak nor walk nor eat, and in short he can do nothing at the prompting of nature only, but weep.

You must not pursue a success, but fly from it.