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.

Celebrity is absolutely preposterous. Entertainment seems to be inflating. It used to be the punctuation to your life, a film or a novel or a play, a way of celebrating a good week or month. Now it feels as if it's all punctuation.

One of the principal goals in my life has been to avoid embarrassing my children by doing the job I do. I hope I've managed to do that, and I hope that, with the job I'm in now, they are, if not proud, at least unembarrassed by it. I must say, my three are most agreeable children, who do nothing but delight me.

I have resolved to pick one novel and just read it over and over again for the rest of my life, because I cannot remember anything anymore.

When I was a small boy, 10, 11, 12, probably somewhere around there, when I first heard a blues song on the radio, it was a jolt of electricity. It grabbed me by the throat, it made me shiver. And I knew from that moment that this was for me and this would be with me for the rest of my life.

You cant spend your life apologizing.

Success, and even life itself, wouldn't be worth anything if I didn't have my wife and children by my side. They mean everything to me.

You can't spend your life apologizing.

Life is going to unfold as it should because life always does.

Life is about balance, and we all have to make the effort in areas that we can to enable us to make a difference.