I don't like affectation.

I'm geek royalty now.

I think the hardest part about anything you do for 18 months is just keeping yourself together for 18 months.

Any pigeonhole is something to be rebelled against.

I've always slightly envied other actors I know who have different reputations. I think, 'God, you don't get people coming up to you, going, 'Hey!' - because they're scared of you.'

It would be a shame for me if I were to become 'Mr. Half-Hour Sitcom.'

My idea of a good night out is staying in.

I'm always interested with other actors in what their process is, and are they still interested in acting, as opposed to being a star.

I think when see you a character on the screen who is actually being touched by the world, and the stuff is actually landing on him, it makes you empathize.

Are there many Tims in America? I don't know if I can think of many American Tims.

I've been well-known in Britain for a long time.

I have less than no interest in trying to replicate another brilliant actor's work, thank you very much.

I have no opinion on 48 frames a second at all. I'd be completely unsuitable to talk about that.

I was on record before I did 'The Hobbit,' saying I don't care at all about 3D. And I suppose I should now say I care a lot about 3D. I've always loved 3D, I think everything should be 3D, and I think it's just a shame 'The Godfather' wasn't in 3D.

My job as an actor is for you, so why should my private life be for you, too? That's not fair.

I wasn't like a Fifties dad.

It's more fun to keep stuff secret.

There's a difference between the parts that I play and who I am and who people think I am. There's quite a big discrepancy sometimes between those things.

I hadn't grown up with 'The Hobbit;' I hadn't grown up with 'Lord of The Rings,' anything like that.

Michael Caine, Tom Courtenay and Al Pacino made me want to act. I've always been interested in men with a vulnerable side.

The best of American television is thought-provoking, original, brilliant, exciting - from 'The Sopranos' on, whether it's 'The Wire' or 'Breaking Bad' or 'House of Cards,' they're fantastic pieces of art.

Television is where the great movies that used to exist have gone.

'The Hobbit's a big gig. It's a huge circus that you become a part of.

If you're alive for more than five minutes, you're going to be disappointed.

I don't want to be poor, of course. But I try not to make that the guiding force behind whether I choose to do something or not.

We all know the films that have affected us from the age of nine onwards, that mean so much to us.

I think the only directing I'd be any good at is theatre directing. It's the only thing I can see myself doing.

At the heart of globalisation is a new kind of intolerance in the West towards other cultures, traditions and values, less brutal than in the era of colonialism, but more comprehensive and totalitarian.

After the Meiji restoration in 1868, Japan adopted an expansionist and colonial attitude towards its neighbours. It sought to identify itself with the West and looked down upon the Asian continent as backward and inferior. For most of the next 70 years, Japan was at war, mainly with its neighbours.

An increasingly multipolar world requires an entirely different kind of U.S. foreign policy: far from being unilateralist, it necessitates a complex form of power-sharing on both a global and regional basis.

Ever since the Meiji restoration in 1868, Japan has turned its back on Asia in general and China in particular: its pattern of aggression from 1895 onwards and the colonies that resulted were among the consequences.

When I am back in old Blighty, I am surrounded by the old and familiar concerns: New Labour, Europe, the Middle East and the rest. If you live in Britain, you will know what I mean - except you won't, because you will take it for granted that this is what the world is all about.

Unlike the Soviet Communist party, the Chinese Communist party chose to introduce capitalism.

Always beware your moment of triumphalism: such emotions are a poor steer on the future.

The question is not whether Tibet should be independent but the extent of the autonomy that it is allowed. Tibet has been firmly ensconced as part of the Chinese empire since the Qing dynasty's military intervention in Tibet in the early 18th century.

The fact that hardly anyone is ever prepared to admit to racist behaviour is perhaps a sort of strength: it speaks to the fact that racism is socially inadmissible.

The cost to Tata of purchasing Land Rover and Jaguar may have been small, but its wider symbolic significance is enormous.

Our leaders increasingly see fit to lecture the ethnic minorities on the need to integrate, including of course the need to speak English. What about the need, though, for Britain to integrate with the rest of the world?

9/11 was a hugely overblown event that only assumed its overarching importance a) because it was done to the United States and b) because of the way the U.S. reacted.

In my experience (I am the lone father of an eight-year-old boy who lost his mother when he was one year old), parenting is the most difficult of all jobs: forget your chief executives, editors, prime ministers and the like - parenting is far more challenging.

For 200 years, the dominant powers have also been the colonial powers: the European countries, the U.S. and Japan. They have never been required to pay their dues for what they did to those whom they possessed and treated with contempt.

My guess is that good and bad parenting is spread fairly evenly across different social groups. But can you imagine Tony Blair lecturing the middle class on how to bring up their children? He is far more comfortable as a latter-day exponent of the Poor Law mentality.

Koizumi was not rooted in Japan's rightwing nationalist tradition: he was a pragmatist and a populist. Abe, in contrast, is a rightwing nationalist. Unlike Koizumi, for example, he has questioned the validity of the postwar Tokyo trials of Japan's wartime leaders, which found many of them guilty of war crimes.

If the truth be told, we are a society that is dripping in racism. This is not in the least surprising. For the best part of two centuries, we British ruled the waves, controlled two-fifths of the planet, and believed it was our responsibility to bring civilisation to those who allegedly lacked it.

If one wanted to find a modern symbol of personal freedom, the motor car is right there near the top of the list. But a car has come to mean much more than that. It has become a powerful statement about who you are and how much you earn.

The more expensive and/or exclusive a sport, the whiter it tends to be: the fact almost has the force of a law. That is the main reason why the Rugby World Cup, the Pacific islands excepted, was so desperately white, the Springboks included.

The two ethnic groups that remain fundamentally different from the Han Chinese - in terms of history, culture, language, religion and physical appearance - are the Uighurs and Tibetans. In these two groups, the Han Chinese come face to face with difference.

Just six years into the 21st century, one can say this is not shaping up to be anything like an American century. Rather, the U.S. seems much more likely to be faced with a very different kind of future: how to manage its own imperial decline.

Israel is the agent and surrogate of the United States and as such is treated entirely differently from every other country in the region. How can anyone expect Iran to accept that it is right for Israel to have nuclear weapons while itself being disallowed?

Western countries are thoroughly accustomed to being the centre of global attention, which they have come to regard as their natural birthright. Not so China. It was thwarted in its attempt to hold the 2000 Olympics, which, as a result of American-led pressure, was awarded to Sydney.