Will Ferrell is my new favorite person in the business. He's a completely adorable man.

The zombie is the new, sort of, archetype of our times.

It's wonderful to play a villain who gets a laugh or to stop a comedy dead in its tracks with a touching moment. It's kind of like a symphony that has very different movements.

I loved playing Roberta Muldoon!

Shakespeare is like mother's milk to me.

I've said no to a lot of things I'd like to have done. My agent has never seen anything like it.

I like to rehearse and rehearse and have everything exactly calculated before we start shooting - probably to a fault.

I got to have a great big knock-down, drag-out fight with Sylvester Stallone. Every actor should have that much fun at some point. You can hit him as hard as you can, and it's never enough for him.

Comedy is very, very hard to achieve.

I'm as vain as the next person, but I've made so much fun of myself over the years, and that's very salutary as you grow older.

People have expectations from you - and the whole fun of acting is taking expectations and completely upending them. That's how you get laughs in comedy, and that's how you scare the daylights out of people in a horror film.

Anytime a culture is in economic stress, ugly things start happening.

If I don't enjoy it, there's something seriously wrong. There's a reason why they call it playing, what we do. It's ecstatic fun, and I overdo it - I mean, I can't seem to stop - people ask me to act, and I say yes.

There's no more private family than the royal family. People who can really only be themselves with each other. The rest of us just spend all our time fascinated by them.

If you read in front of your kids, it's very likely that they'll become readers, too.

We all have our secrets, and we all have our deceptions. Acting, at its best, is all about deceiving people, and this makes it all the more interesting to us.

Every time I see somebody behaving truly insanely in real life, I think, 'Yes! I'm not over the top after all!'

For me, working on stage is much more exhausting than all the other mediums, but it's also much more thrilling.

In animation, there's this exhilarating moment of discovery when you see the film and you say, Oh THAT'S what I was doing.

Other people have often had more faith in me than I had in myself - I never thought I could pull off Roberta Muldoon in 'The World According to Garp,' or 'Of Mice and Men's' Lennie as one of my first acting jobs.

I love New York. I lived there all through the '70s and have lived in L.A. since the early '80s but come back all the time to do theater.

I'm a fun father, but not a good father. The hard decisions always went to my wife.

It's pretty rare that I see a film that I did a long, long time ago.

I gave up shame a long time ago.

I can't imagine doing an hour-long dramatic series because it's so much work. A sitcom is a wonderful gig. You work from 10 to 4 every day, it's fun, and you get to live at home.

I consider myself a very lucky actor that, approaching 60, I'm still employed and employable.

Remaining childish is a tremendous state of innocence.

If my leg falls off, I'll get a prosthetic. There'd be no deep sadness about. I'd just get on with it! It's called life, and I love life. You have to be positive, and you have to crack on no matter what.

Sometimes the most positive thing you can be in a boring society is absolutely negative.

I hate death; it takes people away from you. You're left feeling rudderless.

Words cannot express quite a lot of feelings, whereas a noise or tone or drone or sound, an accordion falling down a staircase, can somehow capture an emotion much better.

Gossip is a very dangerous tool. We should be more wary of the gossiper, and not the gossip they're trying to relay to you.

When I write, my brain moves faster than my hands so I'm always trying to picture things.

I went to visit Alcatraz years ago when I was on tour with the Pistols, and I really liked the atmosphere of the place. I genuinely, really, thoroughly enjoyed the whole morning there. I just liked the quietness and stillness of what is basically a cruel prison complex. I still found some kind of joy in that. That's how I am.

Move to Italy. I mean it: they know about living in debt; they don't care. I stayed out there for five months while I was making a film called 'Order Of Death,' and they've really got it sussed. Nice cars. Sharp suits. Great food. Stroll into work at 10. Lunch from 12 till three. Leave work at five. That's living!

Britain's an island; it's always had a constant ebb and flow of immigration - it makes it a better place.

I'm not here for your amusement. You're here for mine.

I don't tolerate liars. When somebody lies to me, that's really, like, just unbearable.

I mean, the genuine roots of culture is folk music.

The only good political movement I've seen lately was Occupy Wall Street. They had no leaders, which was genius. But unfortunately it always ends up with some hippy playing a flute.

Some song ideas absolutely require a kind of rigid discipline, and others require absolute chaotic abandon. The form is only valid if you know how to un-form it. I don't mean to sound like an intellectual here!

Oscar Wilde turned the world upside down and was able to laugh at it, and hopefully by the time I'm 120 and worn out, that's what I will achieve. I love being alive so much.

I've always said, I thought the Sex Pistols was more Music Hall than anything else - because I think that really, more truths are said in humour than any other form.

I like crazy people, especially those who don't see the risk.

One of the most beautiful things about Britain, apart from the NHS and the free education, is the British Army.

'Lollipop Opera' is the backdrop to Finsbury Park. A place that is very thriving, interracial and lot of music stores, Greek, Turkish, all sorts of immigrant music. It's utter Englishness. It blends the Jamaicans, the Irish. It's like what Jim Reeves did with American country music.

Love is 2 minutes and 52 seconds of squelching noises.

I was brought up and raised in Britain as a Labour man, and that quickly changed. And I find there are more working-class people in the Conservative Party than the Labour party.

I've never told anyone this. But I suffer from terrible stage fright. True. You can't tell though, can you? Unbelievable, the panic. I nearly die of fear before I go on stage. Something wicked. I can't eat a thing the day before a gig. It'd make me vomit.

Heaven is on this earth. There are no angels on the clouds with twanging harps... That's just another man's fantasy.