'Motorcycle Diaries' had the best costumes - that battered jacket and those linen shirts. I wear linen shirts in real life, too, and I have a nice, simple number I got handed down. As a father, you just stop buying stuff for yourself. It's all for the kids.

In order to do 'Amores Perros,' I had to skip some time at drama school, so the director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu came up with a great Latin American solution, which was to say I had a tropical disease and had to stay in Mexico for a while. Everyone believed me.

I always wanted to act, but I never thought it would be my profession. I thought that I'd end up doing other things, but that in the meantime I'd do plays.

I'm addicted to avocados, and I'll put them with anything, particularly chillies. Can you imagine if they became extinct? That would be like the apocalypse, no?

I'm never going to be able to leave Mexico, really. It would be foolish of me to do it. I would be wasting such a great opportunity that the accident of life, or destiny, gave me, which is to be Mexican. If we would make 'Lord of the Rings' analogies, I think Mexico City is Middle-earth. That's where the fight of humanity is.

We all have a cross-gender character: Every woman has a man that they can play, and every man has a woman that they can play.

My mom had me when she was 19 or 20. And my father was 22 or something. They were working on whatever they could, both of them aiming to be actors in theater.

Talking about food is like talking about your dreams. Everyone has something to say. We all have to eat, it's just what we eat which differs. Some people eat for fuel and I feel bad for them.

I always laugh a lot when I see the dramas that I end up doing. I see myself behaving very seriously and I'm like, 'What is this?'

Theatricality is a concept. It's not a specific language.

In Mexico, theater is very underground, so if you're a theater actor it's very difficult to make a living. But it's also a very beautiful pathway to knowledge and to an open education.

The collective experience of watching a great film together in a room is a transcendent moment that will never die.

In a comedy, after the day is done, you can figure out ways of how to make it even funnier for the next day. In dramas, it's very different - the mindset that you're in.

Recently I've been doing risottos. Some of them have been amazing. Some of them, not all of them.

Every democracy is constructed day-to-day. And the electoral process reduces and minimalizes every single aspect of human complexity. We're putting it into pamphlets. We're doing a publicity show. We're becoming symbols.

Let's not give the electoral process so much importance. We have to be cynical about it. Let's give importance to the real democracy that's constructed on a day-to-day basis. That's my hopeful perspective on it.

In English, I'm a little bit limited. I speak English as a second language, and that's a little limitation that I have to work around and I have to use it to my favor. So, yes, that's why I end up wanting to do more things in Latin America.

I go with the flow. Whatever music you play for me, I'll dance.

I didn't know I wanted to do films until I started to do them. Very few films are made in Mexico and film-making belonged to a very specific group, a clique.

I asked the producers when I was doing 'Y Tu Mama Tambien' if they could give me a VHS recording of the film that I could show to my family, because in Mexico and Latin America, when you do a film, you don't expect anybody to see it, especially not in the cinema.

I was asked to go to Cannes to present Amores Perros. And little did I know that this film would be huge. I saw it for the first time in Cannes, and it was the first time I'd seen myself on such a big screen. And it had a huge impact on me - it was the strangest feeling.

Films, fiction, can encompass a whole global vision on a particular subject with any story, whatever it is. You can play the story in whatever country with whatever language in whatever style you want to tell the story in.

Texas is a country in its own. It's made up of half Mexico/half United States but completed mixed. I don't mean to draw a generalization but it is a place, a territory, that's really made up of all these encounters, you know?

Alexander Gonzalez Inarritu is a great director. He's the one I first worked with. He's amazing.

We have a documentary film festival in Mexico. It's really original. It's called Ambulante, and it's a film festival that travels around several cities in Mexico.

In terms of work, obviously acting is such a job that is very in the flesh kind of thing. It's your work, but it's your life, in a way. You can get so mixed up.

I want to do work, but I also want to have a good time.

It's not easy to act, but to direct to act. It goes form one place to the next. It's not heading for the punchline, and also it's not about scoring goals. It's about passing the ball, and the goals will come by themselves.

I think the water dictates how food will taste in a country. In England the apples taste unlike apples grown in any other place. England is an island, there's a lot of salt in the air and in the water. I think that has something to do with it.

A person isn't born with the intelligence to be with someone special; you learn it, and you fail in the path of life, but you don't have to give up the chance to love.

Democracy should be practiced not every six years, but every day.

Talent survives and remains while beauty is diluted.

Histories are to educate so that we understand better for ourselves and for motivation.

The type of music we know as classical music began with rich people hiring musicians or owning them in a way. Without funding, it's very hard to have this experience. Be it state money or private money, there has to be someone dedicated to raising the money.

Music is really nothing if you think about it - it only becomes something when somebody listens to it. And then it becomes uncontrollable.

You can't be happy in a place like London when you don't have money.

My parents separated when I was very small. I grew up with my mother, and I was a single child then. She was very independent, doing her things and having fun alone and working.

In general, I hate films that are overtly either very masculine or very feminine, you know? The same way that I don't like a war movie about soldiers smashing people's heads. But a chick flick I like would be Cassavetes' movies. 'A Woman Under the Influence,' 'Husbands.'

The concept of monogamy is an inheritance of a medieval time, when family would carry the tradition of the name and certain privileges. It's a way of organizing society, perhaps.

In Mexico, audiences want to see a big discussion around a film - what we expect from Hollywood films worldwide is more of an entertaining show. 'Y Tu Mama Tambien' was a road movie and comedy, but it had a very strong political connotation that sparked a discussion in Mexico that is still going on.

Comedy requires a lot of energy.

If anybody is interested in listening to good modern music, I would recommend Jim Fassett, 'Symphony of the Birds.' It's really beautiful... with real birds.

There is something about the live performance of an orchestra that makes it very different to a film. With a film, you can rewrite it in a way with the material you have, and in rehearsals, you're really trying out different things. In an orchestra, you can't do that. They separate as soon as the performance factor comes into play.

I think the best thing I can say about it - and I think the best thing you can say about anything, really - is that 'The Motorcycle Diaries' made me feel like my home was bigger; it made me feel at home anywhere in Latin America.

I feel optimistic about how heterogeneous societies pull together. We just have to keep on with the struggle.

As actors, we don't shy away from saying, 'I wanted to be an actor because I wanted to meet girls.' Directors cannot say the same thing.

People still say to me, 'What, you still live in Mexico?' I don't have to go to the United States simply to find work, and I don't have to stop what I'm doing. I mean, which Hollywood film beats 'The Motorcycle Diaries?'

The world of classical music is so fascinating. It's a world that encompasses people from everywhere and erases the basic restraints of nationality; everyone is united by this common language of music.

I don't know, a lot of people go crazy about 'Breaking Bad,' but I don't like the soap opera aspect of it and only following one character. I like the context to all of it, all the pieces, like 'The Wire.' It's more about the state of things; it's not about the narrative of a person.

Everywhere in the world, we're aware that democracy has incredible flaws and that the word has been used, especially in the United States, to wage wars.