Life is just more comfortable if you're honest and open about everything. I spent so many years being in the closet about one thing or another.

The effort of learning. It's the same when you approach any new skill or technique, from a dance step to driving a car. The effort of learning stops you, at first, from doing it well.

Most of my career has been spent with the RSC doing Shakespeare, and the thing you learn from Shakespeare is that his historical plays don't bear anything other than a basic resemblance to history.

What drew me to acting in the first place was disguise.

I can feel the power of the words doing the work. Must trust language more.

I have a Woody Allen Jewish attitude to life: that it's all going to be disastrous. That it hasn't all been that way is simply down to some random quirk of fate.

It's good for actors to confront those things we have to act: panic, pain and death.

I don't believe in an afterlife.

I feel so sorry for younger actors who aren't able to have the opportunities that I had, starting out in repertory theatre. It's really tough on young actors now.

When I'm painting and drawing I only do people. Acting is obviously portraiture - and writing is as well.

The whole of my acting career is a bit of a mystery to me.

Doubt makes faith true

a finger pointing with particular aim too far from the goal in effect points at everything.

Ive created a new drink! I'm calling it the Piñata Colada! Its sweet and tasty, but when you wake up the next morning your head feels like its been hitten with a stick.

If I am not for myself who is for me? And if I am only for myself what am I? And if not now when?

People didn't think animals thought or remembered or had minds! They most certainly do: any pet owner knows more than a lot of scientists about animals.

Worry is a form of fear, and all forms of fear produce fatigue. A man who has learned not to feel fear will find the fatigue of daily life enormously diminished.

When you transcend the transcendent states, you get past the ego structure, and at that point you don't need laws, you have "morality!" You have inborn, natural ethics, because it is built on Love.

The truth and its opposite are flip sides of the same coin.

He loved the scratching of pencil against paper when he was focused: it meant something was happening.

If you believe in someone enough, and you just don't stop believing in them, mo matter what, no matter how much they push you away, and no matter how often they prove they're only there to use you.