I turn up in Los Angeles every now and then, so I can get some big money films in order to finance my smaller money films.

I like the physical activity of gardening. It's kind of thrilling. I do a lot of weeding.

Film is not literature - the image on screen is the information you get.

I have lots of favourite memories but I can't say that I have a favourite film.

I'm essentially the result of other people's imagination. And that's fine. Because of other people's imagination, I've played parts I would never have thought I could do. Still, I've never had a hankering or an ambition for any particular role.

Don't forget there are two sides to performing. Finding the truth, but you also have to be transparent enough for the audience to see it. How many times have you seen a performance and thought: 'Well, it seems to be meaning a great deal to you but it ain't coming across to me?' It is to be shared.

Half the stuff I have done which has been successful would never have been made if it had been shown to focus groups.

My mother's father drank and her mother was an unhappy, neurotic woman, and I think she has lived all her life afraid of anyone who drinks for fear something like that might happen to her.

I mark a script like an exam, and I try not to do anything under 50 per cent. Similarly with the part. And also film is a peculiar thing, parts don't necessarily read in script form anything like as well as they can do when it comes to materialising.

If you do an interview in 1960, something it's bound to change by the year 2000. And if it doesn't, then there's something drastically wrong.

I knew I didn't want to pursue an academic career at all, which, of course, my father would have loved me to have done. I didn't want to go to university. The only other thing I could do was paint, and so I went to art school because they couldn't conceive of how one would be an actor.

I don't care about the length of anything I play, as long as it's a good character.

I'm not really a big musical fan. I enjoyed 'West Side Story' when it came out, but it gets a bit tired in the end.

Everything that came to me, in terms of the ritzier side of performing, was a plus.

I'm horribly self-critical.

Parents are the worst teachers, if they are good at it and you're not. My father thought I was the densest offspring he could have produced.

I can't say that I wouldn't prefer to make small films, basically because I think they are probably more interesting in terms of the material. But every now and again, it's quite good to do a big one.

I first decided that I wanted to act when I was 9. And I was at a very bizarre prep school at the time; to say 'high Anglo-Catholic' would be a real English understatement.

My father's a clergyman, and he was in the mission field for a certain amount of time in British Honduras, which is now Belize.

You can't lose your concentration at all. And there are times when you're on the stage, and you've got silence, which is wonderful, but you have to have the confidence to make you realize it's fine. You can't suddenly wobble and think, 'They're not interested.'

I have done quite a lot of outsider figures.

It would be difficult to have any unfulfilled ambitions because I don't have any ambitions. I've never been that kind of performer.

Pretending to be other people is my game and that to me is the essence of the whole business of acting.

I remember once when I told Lindsay Anderson at a party that acting was just a sophisticated way of playing cowboys and Indians he almost had a fit.

I never had any ambition to be a star, or whatever it is called, and I'm still embarrassed at the word.

I'm very much of the opinion that to work is better than not to work.

I say you play a part, you don't work one.

I don't know whether I inspire anything in anyone.

I didn't consider myself to be pretty, not at all.

I don't think you automatically become an enlightened person because you are a daddy. But they will change you, of course - their understanding of you puts you in a different place.

If you are lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it.

Your memory is a monster; you forget - it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you - and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!

Of all the things you choose in life, you don't get to choose what your nightmares are. You don't pick them; they pick you.

Half my life is an act of revision.

If you presume to love something, you must love the process of it much more than you love the finished product.

Good habits are worth being fanatical about.

I write the last line, and then I write the line before that. I find myself writing backwards for a while, until I have a solid sense of how that ending sounds and feels. You have to know what your voice sounds like at the end of the story, because it tells you how to sound when you begin.

To each other, we were as normal and nice as the smell of bread. We were just a family. In a family even exaggerations make perfect sense.

There are few things as seemingly untouched by the real world as a child asleep.

I suppose I'm proudest of my novels for what's imagined in them. I think the world of my imagination is a richer and more interesting place than my personal biography.

You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.

You know, people think you have to be dumb to skip rope for 45 minutes. No, you have to be able to imagine something else. While you're skipping rope, you have to be able to see something else.

I grew up in a family where, through my teenage years, I was expected to go to church on Sunday. It wasn't terribly painful. I thought some of the stories were neat; I liked some of the liturgy and some of the songs.

'Great Expectations' was an important novel in my adolescence. It was very much one of those emblematic novels that made me wish I could write like that. It helped that my models as a writer were dead over a hundred years before I began to write.

I've always been a fan of the 19th century novel, of the novel that is plotted, character-driven, and where the passage of time is almost as central to the novel as a major minor character, the passage of time and its effect on the characters in the story.

I believe in plot, in development of character, in the effect of the passage of time, in a good story - better than something you might find in the newspaper. And I believe a novel should be as complicated and involved as you're capable of making it.

More than a half, maybe as much as two-thirds of my life as a writer is rewriting. I wouldn't say I have a talent that's special. It strikes me that I have an unusual kind of stamina.

I believe that, in any novel of mine, the principal objective is the construction of the whole.

I grew up without a father, who was kept a mystery to me. There was a sense of uprootedness, things being one day here and the next day not; a sense anything could happen. Then, all of a sudden, my mother met my stepfather, and her life became happier, and my life changed, my name changed.

I'm not writing non-fiction. I don't feel anything about me as a kid was unique. Except that I had more interest in being alone and using my imagination.