Life is sometimes novel-shaped, mocking the efforts of those authors who, in an effort to make their novels life-shaped, spurn the easy symmetry and cheap resonance of reality.

Part of life is learning what to be ashamed of and what to be proud of.

You should give up.' 'Why?' 'For one thing, you'll live longer.' 'Oh, you don't live longer. It just seems longer.

It would be impossible to imagine going through life without swearing, and without enjoying swearing.

Life, that can shower you with so much slendour, is unremittingly cruel to those who have given up.

Madam, I have been looking for a person who disliked gravy all my life; let us swear eternal friendship’.

It was a Tuesday in February. Many my life's most awful moments have taken place on Tuesdays. And what is February if not the Tuesday of the year?

We live in a bubble of the fantasy of death, but the reality of it is something that we obviously all face and have to deal with, at some point.

My tragedy is that all I want is a dog, and yet I have been cursed with cats all my life.

I don't find the life in Hollywood all that meaningful or inspiring.

I live a very Kenneth Williams-like existence.

I find increasingly that the more extreme are the things going on in your life, the more cultural reference points fail you. More mythical reference points actually help, and you realize that's what myths are for. It's for human beings to process their experience in extremis.

Having said that, what I think we found, in doing the show, and in life, generally, is that the more you try to separate sex from everything else, it's impossible. You can't. The act of observation affects the actual experiment, and we see that in this.

Throughout my life, whenever I thought I'm dancing welI, I'm not.

Although I'm largely doing other things in life, it's very nice occasionally to put my toe back in the waters of show business.

Courage is soldiers fighting on the front line, or people living on the bread line.

It's very rare in life to be sure about something - particularly when it's an issue.

Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of acting: character acting and lead acting. And in my life, to begin with, in the 1980s, it was all character acting. And then when, by fluke, through 'Four Weddings', I got into doing lead parts, it's a completely different thing.

Neither Elizabeth or I are keen to do a real-life couple on the screen. It's not very electric.

“Life is a fight, and I like a good soldier.”

It's very true that you can be both selfless and selfish at the same time. What we tend towards, particularly in filmmaking, is this binary sort of, 'This is a good guy, this is a bad guy.' And I quite like the fact that life is a bit more complex than that.

Basically, my life is so boring, it's embarrassing.

I look at life and I see some very happy relationships, but I also see the vast majority as not being that happy.

Driving a motorcycle is like flying. All your senses are alive. When I ride through Beverly Hills in the early morning, and all the sprinklers have turned off, the scents that wash over me are just heavenly. Being House is like flying, too. You're free of the gravity of what people think.