To people who don’t know me I’m defined by a number of things that people know about me that are entirely untrue.

I’m woefully one-track-minded.

I think some actors thrive on working at a much greater pace than I do.

Perhaps I’m particularly serious, because I’m not unaware of the potential absurdity of what I’m doing.

As actors, we’re all encouraged to feel that each job is the last job. They plant some little electrode in your head at an early stage and you think, ‘Be grateful, be grateful, be grateful.’

I can’t honestly account for the very personal response that I have to one story and not another, a sense of an orbit, the orbit of a world that draws me as my own life...

I’m not picky, quite honestly.

A lot of guys in jail tattoo their hands.

I can’t re-examine work I did in the past with pride.

One of the great privileges of having grown up in a middle-class literary English household, but having gone to school in the front lines in Southeast London, was that I became half-street-urchin and half-good-boy at...

If people take an interest in you and they think there’s half a chance, they might hang on. It’s dreadful.

I’m not keen on history being tampered with… to any extent.

At some point in your life, if you’re lucky, you get to design the way in which things evolve.

In all fields of creativity you see the result of work that has become habit. Where the creative impulse has become flaccid or has died out altogether, and yet because it is our work and...

I see a lot of movies. I love films as a spectator, and that’s never obscured by the part of me that does the work myself. I just love going to the movies.

How can you be a recluse in a house full of children, even if you had the inclination to be, which I don’t?

I became conflicted in my late teens.

I don’t feel my son should pay the price for what I do.

The one thing that I appear to have been given, bearing in mind that I am capable of being very, very scatty and extremely lazy, is the ability to concentrate on something I choose to...

My curiosity sustains me for the period of the shoot.

I’m very often still very much alive for that other being and that other world long after the film is finished.

If you remain unsettled by a piece of writing, it means you are not watching the story from the outside; you’ve already taken a step towards it.

I think I have a strange relationship with time. I’m not really aware of that time passing. I don’t feel that I’m wasteful with time. But I’m not aware of it passing.

Quite honestly, if I were doing work related to a living being or historical being where there was visual or audio recordings available, I would find that extremely difficult because I don’t know how you...

I have always been intrigued by these lives I have never experienced.

I don’t deal at all well with the relative amount of stuff I have to face already.

I don’t torture myself.

I love to sit and watch people. I love to sit and listen to people.

My preference is that, that day when someone sticks a tripod in front of you with a camera on the top, it is not day one.

I’ve been very lucky.

I didn’t like the idea of being foolish, but I learned pretty soon that it was essential to fail and be foolish.

Being at the centre of a film is a burden one takes on with innocence the first time. Thereafter, you take it on with trepidation.

It is awesome to feel you are carrying on the family name.

If you have a certain wildness of spirit, a cabinet maker’s workshop is not the place to express it.

I hate the domestic life.

I feel less often compelled to do the work than I was in the past.

At a certain age it just became apparent to me that this was probably the work that I would have to do.

The last time I was on a small set would’ve been probably My Left Foot.

I’ve got a serious-looking head.

I like things that make you grit your teeth. I like tucking my chin in and sort of leading into the storm. I like that feeling. I like it a lot.

Ireland was a place for the renewal of hope and I still see it like that.

Films exhaust me, they do, and I often want nothing more to do with them, but I’m continually surprised at the resurgence of the impulse to come back and do it all over again.

Everybody has to know for themselves what they’re capable of.

I love what I do.

I find it difficult to be in rooms now for long periods of time. I can usually take it for about an hour. Then I stride out.

I live in a landscape, which every single day of my life is enriching.

I still relate to my father very much. I mean, I talk to him in a certain way, as we do talk to the dead.

Very often there’s this misapprehension about actors being people that need to display themselves, to reveal themselves in public.

It must be hard interviewing actors.

When I was younger, I made some decisions that I shouldn’t have. And, in hindsight, I’ve almost always been wrong when I haven’t listened to myself.