"Growing up, my mates and I would have rather been Sid Vicious or members of the Royal Family."

"I backpacked through France and Italy in my teens, and then I was at Cannes with the first movie I did in '84."

"I love 'Manhattan', and I know it's not one of Woody's favorites."

"I would definitely do TV, at the drop of a hat, if I was offered a good role."

"In filming, you're waiting - you're waiting for lights, you're waiting for people to set things up - and when you're not waiting, you're repeating."

"I feel more comfortable in drama. Comedy is a high-wire act. I find it stressful. It's a precision science in a way."

"Some people would say comedy draws from some dark places, from your dark stuff. Life's great optimists aren't necessarily the funniest people."

"I was delighted to become a popular-culture reference point. I'm still delighted about it actually, and I still find it to be weird."

"My singing voice is somewhere between a drunken apology and a plumbing problem."

"We've always been involved with America - I have a son who lives there and it's a big part of my life."

"As much as the next person, I want to be approved of, but I'm not greedy for that stuff."

"Bridget Jones is part of literary lore now and actually to be a part of it is enormously flattering."

"Hollywood hasn't aggressively pursued me. Neither have I aggressively pursued Hollywood."

"I do notice that when I've been away and I come back to London. People look at you. People are ready to pick arguments."

"I do think I'm a character actor."

"I don't want to sound smug but I am reasonably satisfied with how it's gone. I think it's fine."

"I'd love to try my hand at something else."

"It used to be that I was always paranoid or a loser or something so there's usually something that you seem to associate yourself with at one time or another."

"Most actors will tell you they have some sort of dream of doing something other than what they're doing."

"The last thing I would attempt to do is to buy clothes for a child I didn't know well."

“Time to leave now, get out of this room, go somewhere, anywhere; sharpen this feeling of happiness and freedom, stretch your limbs, fill your eyes, be awake, wider awake, vividly awake in every sense and every pore.”

“Only the person who has experienced light and darkness, war and peace, rise and fall, only that person has truly experienced life.”

“Besides, isn't it confoundedly easy to think you're a great man if you aren't burdened with the slightest idea that Rembrandt, Beethoven, Dante or Napoleon ever lived?”

“No guilt is forgotten so long as the conscience still knows of it.”

“All I know is that I shall be alone again. There is nothing more terrible than to be alone among human beings.”

“How terrible this darkness was, how bewildering, and yet mysteriously beautiful!”

“In chess, as a purely intellectual game, where randomness is excluded, - for someone to play against himself is absurd ...

“Freedom is not possible without authority - otherwise it would turn into chaos and authority is not possible without freedom - otherwise it would turn into tyranny.”

“In this instant, shaken to her very depths, this ecstatic human being has a first inkling that the soul is made of stuff so mysteriously elastic that a single event can make it big enough to contain the infinite.”

“Wer einmal sich selbst gefunden, kann nichts auf dieser Welt mehr verlieren.”

“For the first time in my life I began to realize that it is not evil and brutality, but nearly always weakness, that is to blame for the worst things that happen in this world.”

“Once a man has found himself there is nothing in this world that he can lose. And once he has understood the humanity in himself, he will understand all human beings.”

“Formerly man had only a body and a soul. Now he needs a passport as well for without it he will not be treated like a human being.”

“Beware of pity.”

“People and events don't disappoint us, our models of reality do. It is my model of reality that determines my happiness or disappointments.”

“Art can bring us consolation as individuals,” he said, “but it is powerless against reality.”

“Maybe everything’s not so hard, maybe life is so much easier than I thought, you just need courage, you just need to have a sense of yourself, then you’ll discover your hidden resources.”

“One only makes books in order to keep in touch with one's fellows after one has ceased to breath, and thus to defend oneself against the inexorable fate of all that lives - transitoriness and oblivion.”

“I realized that there was no point in denying oneself a pleasure because it was denied another, in refusing to allow oneself to be happy because someone else was unhappy.”

“A first premonition of the rich variety of life had come to him; for the first time he thought he had understood the nature of human beings - they needed each other even when they appeared hostile, and it was very sweet to be loved by them.”

“It is never until one realizes that one means something to others that one feels there is any point or purpose in one’s own existence.”

“But I see nothing miraculous about it. Nothing makes one as healthy as happiness, and there is no greater happiness than making someone else happy.”

“Once more my pity had been stronger than my will.”

“She could be lively only in the midst of life; in isolation she dwindled to a shadow.”

“For the more a man restricts himself the closer he is, conversely, to infinity.”

“Exalt yourself by devoting yourself to others, enrich yourself by making everyone’s destiny your own, by enduring and understanding every facet of human suffering through your pity.”

“But theoretical, imagined suffering is not what distresses a man and destroys his peace of mind. Only what you have seen with pitying eyes can really shake you.”

“My today and each of my yesterdays, my rises and falls, are so diverse that I sometimes feel as if I had lived not one, but several existences, each one different from the others.”

“in the general throng, many a fool receives decorations and titles.”

“But since those days in Vienna I had been aware that Austria was lost, not yet suspecting, to be sure, how much I had lost thereby.”