From my experience, I think that every actor has to make sure that they're in charge of their own career somehow or other.

I mean, language fascinates me anyway, and different words have different energies and you can change the whole drive of a sentence.

The point about a great story is that it's got a beginning, a middle and end.

You try to find things that are challenging and interesting and hopefully it will be the same to the audience.

I knew with Snape I was working as a double agent, as it turns out, and a very good one at that.

Parts win prizes, not actors.

In theater, you've got to be aware of your whole body because it involves stamina. It involves two-and-a-half hours and a sustained release of energy, maybe for six months.

Actors are agents of change. A film, a piece of theater, a piece of music, or a book can make a difference. It can change the world.

I can only see my limitations. That's just who I am.

I'm a lot less serious than people think.

I suppose with any good writing and interesting characters, you can have that awfully overused word: a journey.

I think there should be laughs in everything. Sometimes, it's a slammed door, a pie in the face or just a recognition of our frailties.

The first time that I came to New York to work properly was the mid-'80s, but I was doing eight shows a week. You have no life. Going to a punk rock club - or whatever the music was at that time - would not have been on my agenda.

Every so often you read a play and a character just speaks to you - almost seems to speak through you, in fact.

Unless we tell stories about ourselves, which is all that theater is, we're in deep trouble.

I have every sympathy for writers. It's a mystery to me what they do. I can edit. I can cross out and say, 'I'm not saying that' or, 'How about we move this to here? Wouldn't that make that bit of the story better?' But where any of it comes from is beyond me. I will never write a play or a novel.

Los Angeles is not a town full of airheads. There's a great deal of wonderful energy there. They say 'yes' to things; not like the endless 'nos' and 'hrrumphs' you get in England!

A lot of the time I hate the theater. You think, 'I have to climb Mount Everest, again, tonight.' Oh, the theater is a scary place to be.

Being on the stage in New York is always exciting because you feel like you're part of the life of the city.

I love perfumes. Every morning when my girlfriend and I come down to the courtyard in our block of flats we're assailed by the most delicious scent - jasmine round a doorway. It almost makes me swoon.

I was a student in London in the '70s, so CBGB really wasn't on my radar at all. Obviously, I was aware of the emergence of the Police in England and as an art student, I was very aware of David Byrne, but I suppose my musical taste at that time certainly didn't stretch towards the Dead Boys or the Ramones.

I always feel that when I come to Edinburgh, in many ways I am coming home.

Any actor who judges his character is a fool - for every role you play you've got to absorb that character's motives and justifications.

Originally, theater was my life. It was what I assumed I'd spend my working life doing - if I was lucky. Then along came movies.

Mellow doesn't describe me. I'm hungry every day.

Actors are actually very supportive of each other.

England in the '60s and the '70s was everything that history has said; it was phenomenally exciting, musically.

I think every English actor is nervous of a Newcastle accent.

I think the thing about film is, as it gets proved by a lot of young filmmakers now, that the medium will just go on reinventing itself, and so you just hope to be a part of that and not a part of some kind of endless regurgitation or 'Here I am doing what you know I do' kind of thing.

Film has to be reflecting the world that we live in, and that's all you want to be a part of. Actors inhabit the same planet as everyone else. It's a weird thing that happens when you're an actor because people hold you up because you somehow embody in parts groups of people or people's hopes or something.

I like it when stories are left open.

The more we're governed by idiots and have no control over our destinies, the more we need to tell stories to each other about who we are, why we are, where we come from, and what might be possible. Or, what's impossible? What's a fantasy?

I have a photograph at home of Fred Astaire from the knees down with his feet crossed. It's kind of inspiring because it reminds me his feet were bleeding at the end of rehearsals. Yet when you watch him, all you see is freedom. It's a reminder of what the job is about in general, not just being in musicals.

Older people say, 'Oh I loved you in 'Sense and Sensibility,' and that's the only film they want to talk about. Equally, there are people who only want to talk about 'Galaxy Quest.' And there's a whole bunch of teenagers who only want to talk about 'Dogma.'

The directors you trust the most are the ones, when you ask them a question, they've got the guts to say, 'I don't know.'