My sister and I both benefited hugely from the great security that our parents had given us, and then we went off and squandered it all rushing around in showbiz.

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.

If I could always read I should never feel the want of company.

Some would call that lucky but lucky is relative

Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.

By 1980, when I came out of prison, The Sun did a campaign to stop putting vice girls in prison. We've talked about it ever since and nothing has been done about it.

Character isn't inherited.

The way I fight, it's not me beatin' the man. I make the man whip himself.

Management is the art of getting things done through people.

I tried to be as positive as possible, because I have the same birthday as Michael Jackson. He is my cosmic brother. I love him.

I had always been an enthusiastic reader of stuff about ancient Greece. I would read Herodotus and Thucydides just for fun.

being funny is a way of being liked and a way of dealing with sadness.