People will say a movie bombed at the box office but I couldn't care less.

You grow up a bit damaged or broken then you have some success but you don't know how to feel good about the work you're doing or the life you're leading.

You start getting hit with some very interesting situations in life - you as a parent - when they approach that teenage area, which is frightening because you still have memories of that age and the things you were doing at that age... Please don't do what I did.

Simplicity - that's what I want. It's been a rare commodity for me for a number of years, but I enjoy being able to hang out with my girl, read the newspaper, and sit back and start to read a book by someone I admire, like Lawrence Krauss or Christopher Hitchens. And that's it - simplicity, where the game of Hollywood doesn't exist.

I think, as an actor, it is good to feel the fear of failing miserably. I think you should take that risk. Fear is a necessary ingredient in everything I do. But if I do 'Hamlet,' it will probably be in a small theater on a small stage, and it will have to be very, very soon because I'm getting a little long in the tooth for it.

What I love to do is paint people's faces, y'know, their eyes. Because you want to find that emotion, see what's going on behind their eyes.

I moved from Kentucky to Miramar, Florida, at about 8. I think I was in second grade. I still had my Southern accent, and down there, you got to experience a melting pot in full fury. All the kids I hung out with were, like, Sicilian kids from Jersey and New York.

When you're doing a movie, your body doesn't allow you to get sick until you finish.

One of the most beautiful things in the world is seeing a mommy with her kids. There's nothing more beautiful, nothing more sublime.

It's good to experience Hollywood in short bursts, I guess. Little snippets. I don't think I can handle being here all the time, it's pretty nutty.

When I was 12, I wanted to learn how to play the guitar, and I found a chord book in a shop, and I stuffed it down my trousers. And that's how I learned to play the guitar.

I suppose the only thing at 50 you can really start to look forward to is just total irresponsibility. As you get older, you can just sit in a chair, wear anything you want, you know you can walk down; old people dress cool. You know they wear sweatpants. The elderly have it down.

It's all kinds of these profound things crashing on you when your child arrives into the world. It's like you've met your reason to live.

I do realise and understand very well on a profound level how lucky I am and what a privileged position it is and what it's done ultimately for me, my family and my kids. But at the same time, there are moments in a man's life when you just kind of want to feel somewhat normal.

The thing is, even if you're playing sort of a heightened character and playing inside sort of a heightened reality, you can still apply your own truths to those characters.

I hate watching myself on screen. I can't stand it.

For a long time I tried to manage an honesty and openness about my personal life because I'm human and I'm normal - well, semi-normal.

I have a place that I get to go to in the Bahamas. It's the only place that guarantees total anonymity and freedom.

There's always that moment on every movie where you just go, 'Okay, this is that moment. I'm about to potentially fall flat on my face, and I might as well just dive in and see what happens.'

There is nothing on earth that could ever make me want to relive certain years of my life when I was young.

For me, it's always more difficult and slightly exposing to play something that's close to yourself. I always like to try to hide, just because I can't stand the way I look.

There are necessary evils. Money is an important thing in terms of representing freedom in our world. And now I have a daughter to think about. It's really the first time I've thought about the future and what it could be.

I have known plenty of people who, in their later years, had the energy of children and the kind of curiosity and fascination with things like little children. I think we can keep that, and I think it's important to keep that part of staying young. But I also think it's great fun growing old.

We all have these shades in our nature: it's a spectrum within all of us.

The thing I find really special in performance is that there is this slightly mystical thing that takes over when you're responding to a crowd and engaging in people's imaginations collectively in a room. I've always thought that one of the most incredible things about being alive is going to see some kind of performance like that.

The reason I stopped music for a while and concentrated on theatre was that it was more conducive to parenting; having the days free was quite handy. I love them both. I hope I don't have to compromise one for the other.

Weirdly, my dad didn't want me to become an actor, he was always quite resistant to it. He told me as much many times. That just made it more attractive to me.

I take them both seriously - I don't particularly want to be an 'actor-musician.' I want to play the great challenging parts, to be right for the part, rather than just, 'Oh, he can play the fiddle.'

In my early twenties, the whole experience of going on tour was like losing myself in this slightly wild environment.

I think everyone in their 30s looks back at their 20s and thinks, 'Oh God, if I'd just done this and this, and not done that.'

Our job as actors is to invent the things that bridge ourselves with the characters, so you have to build something if it's not there - you try and learn what makes people behave in a certain way.

I'm married to the girl that I first went out with when I was 16. We were on and off for years; now we're married with a kid, so I don't have that many exes.

It's great being an actor and being part of a play or a film where there's usually quite a big group of people who are collaborating, and your job is really to fit in and share that energy. With music, because I write the songs, it's a broader, more abstract process.

I had a series of jobs in the small fishing village in West Wales where my family lived when I was a teenager. I worked as a fisherman in the day, and then the skipper and his wife ran a small restaurant - she'd cook the fish he caught.

I actually do bits of my writing in sort of incidental spaces - when I'm traveling on the Tube or on a bus. More often than not, it's a reaction to how you feel about something, and if you're sitting down and concentrating on, 'I must write something,' then you can't have a truthful reaction.

The moment you have children, it's like your heart gets out of your body, puts on clothes, and walks away.

I definitely asked too many questions of my teachers and was probably a bit facetious at times.

I have a classical music background. I studied violin and trumpet.

My only incentive is to write music that changes me, where the process of making it is a discovery and is true in some way, at that moment.

My guitar is a 1934 National Trojan. They call it a resonator, which is the guitar guys played in the honky-tonks before amplification. It's very loud. It's the type of guitar that Son House and Robert Johnson played.

It's interesting to marry American musical traditions with the subtlety of English-style storytelling and folk singer-songwriters like Martin Carthy and Bert Jansch - they're two heritages that are distinct but also cross over on so many levels.

I'm a big Bob Dylan fan. I'm also a blues geek.

I find it hugely exciting to be dealing with another writer's language.

I fell in love with the legend of Paul Robeson as a kid. My dad would tell me all these amazing stories about his life and, bizarrely, ended up singing to Robeson on his deathbed.

I like really bad puns - proper, red-top, nasty puns - I find them funny.

I've always identified as an actor. That's what I set out to do.

Music always gets bumped until I have some time to get around to it.

What's quite nice about this whole folk movement is that it's born out of genuine friendship. And nobody's infringing on anybody's space.

The Band mean a lot to me in terms of what I aspire to achieve with my group, as the music they made went against the fashion of the time.

Taking someone else's language and fitting it into your own speech - you learn a lot about other people's brains, doing that.