Very, very broadly speaking, you can put directors into two areas: One for whom you work, and the other with whom you work. And I prefer the latter, for obvious reasons. It's a great relief to feel that you're working with someone rather than for someone.

I like entertaining. I adore it. I feel I'm in the right place. Without question.

I've been incredibly lucky with the directors I've worked with.

It's quite a dangerous career move to go wilfully on making films that may not find a distributor.

I'd love to claim that what I have done in my life is of my doing, but it's not of my doing at all. I've blown around in the wind like a mad thing, influenced by this and that - like a piece of paper: like the boy in that scene in 'American Beauty' watching a piece of paper blowing hither and thither.

I think people should be protected from being made to feel that they want to know what somebody famous had for breakfast.

There are situations where you are left robbed of all quality of life, and I believe it is entirely up to you how you want to deal with that. You can follow the dictates of religion if that is what you believe in, or you can take a personal decision.

I've always felt, and I think I'm qualified to say so because I've won a few awards, that it's a terrible shame to put something in competition with something else to be able to sell something.

There's an awful lot of hanging around when you're doing science fiction. Going down and waiting for them to set up, being told to go back to your dressing room while they change the track and the lighting and so on.

Human beings are very good at adapting to what happens.

You can see areas where maybe you got a bit lazy, perhaps, or you see when you were really on form. I think an actor is very like a sportsman in that respect. You have periods where you're in terrific form. Everything you touch seems to work and come right. And other times, when you're working really hard, it's okay, but it isn't scintillating.

I've done some stinkers in the cinema. You can't regret it; there are always reasons for doing something, even if it's just the location.

The clergy is in the same business as actors, just a different department.

The things that I've enjoyed most are not really science fiction. They are not much fun to make because there are so many toys involved. They are fun for directors who like toys, like Ridley Scott, but they are not a lot of fun to make. A lot of hanging around, changing this and that.

I first got involved with Mel Brooks through 'The Elephant Man.' Everybody knows now, but they didn't know at the time that he was the producer.

I am not an enormous believer in research being the be-all and end-all. I get suspicious when I read about actors spending six months in a clinic, say, in order to play someone who is sick.

I put everything I can into the mulberry of my mind and hope that it is going to ferment and make a decent wine. How that process happens, I'm sorry to tell you I can't describe.

As Beckett said, it's not enough to die, one has to be forgotten as well.

How my film career happened, I don't know. It was unplanned. I'd been in films and TV throughout the Sixties and early Seventies, but it was really 'The Naked Civil Servant' in 1975 that put me on the radar.

I've lived publicly and never hidden behind closed doors. Therefore, if I have gone over the top sometimes, it has been visible.

I've never guided my life. I've just been whipped along by the waves I'm sitting in. I don't make plans at all. Plans are what make God laugh. You can make plans, you can make so many plans, but they never go right, do they?

The most difficult thing about painting is the self-discipline. When I finish a job, I give myself a few days, but then I have to discipline myself quite fiercely if I want to do some painting that's worthwhile. Otherwise, you're just doodling. It's much easier when you're just told what you have to do.

If I'm in theatre, cinema doesn't even cross my mind. Similarly when I'm making a film, theatre doesn't cross my mind.

Nudes are the greatest to paint. Everything you can find in a landscape or a still life or anything else is there: darkness and light, character dimension, texture. I painted heads too, of course.