It can be very difficult to trace your birth parents.

I work hard. I work 80-90 hours a week in part-time football.

People have an idea that one is in control of a career, a lot more than you really are. You can engineer things to an extent. But you are at the mercy of what comes...

I was offered a choice of a flat salary up front or a percentage of the film’s future earnings. I took the up front money. Nobody could have figured what Halloween would ultimately become.

I constantly experience failure in that my work is never as good as I want it to be. So I live with failure.

When I go to a movie, I’m always thrilled if I’ve seen an actor do something and I didn’t realize until the end of the movie that that was that person. I love that.

In America, through pressure of conformity, there is freedom of choice, but nothing to choose from.

I do not believe that friends are necessarily the people you like best, they are merely the people who got there first.

The film is about Joe discovering who his mother and father are and his relationship with them, and the identity crisis he goes through once he finds out who his parents are.

Twelve years on sets watching directors, I’ve taken a bit from everybody and rejected a lot.

Well I am afraid that I am going to die, because I have just put a down payment on a house.

I wasn’t ever a huge fan of comics. Just not one of those kids, you know?

The play is on top of me all the time, and I am constantly thinking about it. Even when I leave the theatre, I’ll mumble the lines to myself or think about the way the...

Now in my theater training I showed no aptitude at all.

Great actors try to dismiss all ideas from their conscious mind in order to provide an experience that is real.

A diplomat these days in nothing, but a head waiter who is allowed to sit down occasionally.

If you have a very good concept of your character, you can snap into it.

I love Dead Ringers. A democratic set, the work was taken seriously.

The sexiest part of the body is the eyes. That’s what I believe.

I applaud anything that can take a kid away from a PlayStation or a Gameboy – that is a miracle in itself.

Continental directors, as opposed to British and American, tend to be somewhat high-handed in their approach.

It’s always great to play a man who sets himself up to be punctured.

It’s very likely that graduates, current employees and retirees have some wonderful pieces of Deer Park history in their closets or garages.

You know, I don’t think you need to be educated to be a great actor.

I’m convinced there’s a small room in the attic of the Foreign Office where future diplomats are taught to stammer.

It must be heartbreaking for a filmmaker to actually start something like that. And then to have some terrible, terrible weather problems.

I would run through brick walls for Spurs.

People imagine that actors are being offered everything and you are not. So things come in and sometimes there are things that I want and can’t get a meeting on, or go to a different...

I’m hardly physically right for the hero parts, now am I?

I envy children who know that they’re going to become doctors, know they’re going to go into the forces or whatever. I think choice is one of the hardest things, but that’s what I try...

A lot of people are going to hate me for saying this, but one of my least favorite kinds of music, or the kind of music that I feel I’ve so got out of my...

Sex is a conversation carried out by other means. If you get on well out of bed, half the problems of bed are solved.

Laughter would be bereaved if snobbery died.

Rather than disliking theatre, I’ve expressed a preference for television because it tends to deal in its small way much more with issues and is able to reach a broader church of people than theatre.

We all need a firm sense of identity.

I’d only read a bit of the first book. And I just knew about all the media furor over it. But I’d not read books 2 or 3. I’d just read a bit of it....

Interesting things come your way but as you get older, your lifestyle changes. I don’t want to travel; I don’t want to be in a hotel room away from my family.

The process of building a part doesn’t really stop.

Now the decision to play a role is halfway towards understanding the character, because you empathize with it and that’s why you want to play it.

I think that was very important to Bacon… personally. I think he went to great efforts to get a house for the Stratford man, to make it so difficult for us to prove that it...

Corruption is nature’s way of restoring our faith in democracy.

And that is how I employ my time in cinema, saying things about people who I think have touched us in terms of our value judgement and by example.

I love my accent, I thought it was useful in Gone In 60 Seconds because the standard villain is upper class or Cockney. My Northern accent would be an odd clash opposite Nic Cage.

I love to mix it up. I love to keep doing different things.

I got obsessed with classical music, I got obsessed with Chopin, with playing the piano.

I am not one of those actors who believes he has to live the part he is playing. I can turn it on and off.

A trip to the mainland was a big event and happened maybe once a year, although now you can get across in a speed boat in seven minutes but then it was a long way...

When I left school I was full of angst, like any teenager, and I channeled it all into comedy.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

If Botticelli were alive today he’d be working for Vogue.