My grandparents all came from Lithuania to South Africa. My first novel, Middlepost, is a fictional account of that journey.

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.

I choose not to fight against but to stand for. Not to go against but to go for.

It taught that there are three versions of things: the one I see in my mind, and the one that carries onto the paper, and then what it ultimately becomes.

A simple dream, a simple thoughtCan generate actions to shake the world.

Damn your principles! Stick to your party.

In the highest class of God's school of suffering we learn not resignation nor patience, but rejoicing in tribulation.

Some of the things you believe were never true. They were someone else's fears. Give yourself a chance to examine your thoughts. Change those that are negative. You are deserving.

Sometimes you just have to reach out and grab what you want, even when they tell you not to. This is something that I've struggled with my whole life long.

Man is, beyond dispute, the most excellent of created beings, and the vilest animal is a dog; but the sages agree that a grateful dog is better than an ungrateful man.

He and I had a bridge that no one else traveled that made us artistic lovers, passionate without a touch of the flesh. He made me thrive, and valuing that, I could do nothing that would endanger it.

If your life's worth living, it's worth recording.