Benedict Cumberbatch's Quotes

Someone will always hate what I say. There's always going to be somebody spitting blood about my wooden-faced, toffee-named, crappy acting.

Talking about class terrifies me. There is no way of winning.

The armoury of having any academic education does not necessarily set you up for being a good or better actor.

The further you get away from yourself, the more challenging it is. Not to be in your comfort zone is great fun.

The more charming person is the person who admits the other person is more charming.

The world of 'Sherlock Holmes' and the world that we live in now is big enough to take more than one interpretation.

There's no shame in stealing - any actor who says he doesn't is lying. You steal from everything.

There's so much in the 21st century that is stymied by bureaucracy and mediocrity and committee.

Upper class to me means you are either born into wealth or you're Royalty.

We all want to escape our circumstances, don't we? Especially if you are an actor.

When are you ever settled enough to have kids?

When you freefall for 7,000 feet it doesn't feel like you're falling: it feels like you're floating, a bit like scuba diving.

When you see a good horseman, you're unable to tell where the instruction is coming from. It's like telepathy.

A woman who knows that she doesn't have to get all decked out to look good is sexy. A woman who can make you feel smart with her conversation skills is also sexy. I believe the sense of humor is important.

'Benedict' means 'blessed.' My parents liked the sound of the name and felt slightly blessed because they'd been trying for a child for a very long time.

Do awards change careers? Well, I haven't heard of many stories where that's the case. It's a fun excuse to meet colleagues and celebrate people who've done well that year in certain people's eyes, and it's nothing more than that.

'Frankenstein' was all about the idea that, through electricity and the destruction of night, man creating light and darkness, we took on god-like powers and then abused them like gods, and we are only men. That's a story about man making a man in his own image. The inversion of natural order.

I got live tweeted once by someone who was opposite my home in some rented accommodation. He was actually describing on twitter what I was doing. 'I took a shirt off, I went to the window, I put a shirt back on... ' And I've got blinds in my flat!

I had a real yearning to make use of the opportunities I had at school. When I heard about the gap year of teaching English at a Tibetan monastery, I knew I had to do something about it really quickly, otherwise it was going to get allocated.

I haven't done period dramas back-to-back, or really anything back-to-back. You get asked to do what you're most recently famed for, so I'm careful of not repeating myself.

I never was obsessive about anything I watched when I was a kid, except maybe 'The A-Team' and 'Airwolf'... And I loved 'Knight Rider' and then later 'Baywatch.'

I think with any characterization there's a point where you empathize, no matter how much of a deviance his or her actions may be from your understanding of humanity.

I was thrilled with how the first series of 'Sherlock' was received. It was such great fun to film, which makes it so rewarding when something you enjoy is so well received.

I'm not confident in social situations; just going up to someone in a bar and saying 'Hi' is going to be even more difficult because they won't know the real me. They will just know me as a fictional person I play on the screen.

If people ask, 'Are you Sherlock Holmes?', it's horribly naff, but I say, 'I'm not, I just look a bit like him' - which is how I feel. There are bad attributes of his that I really don't share!

It's difficult because nothing's preordained by plan and you can't control it. That's one of those joys and thrills and nerve-racking realities of being an actor. A lot has to do with luck, no matter what your talent or contribution can be.

Metaphorically speaking, it's easy to bump into one another on the journey from A to B and not even notice. People should take time to notice, enjoy and help each other.

My first agent dissuaded me from calling myself 'Cumberbatch.' I had six months of not very productive time with her, so I changed agents. The new one said, 'Why aren't you using your family name? It's a real attention-grabber.' I worried, 'How much is it going to cost to put my name in lights?' But then I decided that's not my problem.

My first, big, silly role at school was as Arthur Crocker-Harris in Rattigan's 'The Browning Version,' where my job was to make school-masters' wives weep with recognition.

One of the fears of having too much work is not having time to observe. And once you get recognised, there is nowhere for you to look any more. You can't sit on a night bus and watch it all happen.

People's hands fascinate me. It's tempting to look at a businessman's left hand and see if there's an indentation from a missing wedding ring. Or maybe there's a tan line and the skin is pressed down where's he's worked a ring off his finger.

'Sherlock' fans are, by and large, an intelligent breed, so they've gone through my back catalogue and got what I've done, why and how I've done it. There is some obsessive behaviour, but I worry for them rather than me.

The number of people my age, younger now, a whole generation younger, who are fiercely bright, over-educated, under-employed and who are politicised and purposeless really upsets me. It's soul-destroying.

There's a huge raft of roles that actors in our culture perform, and you can see any one of about three Hamlets in a year. It's not something to be completely daunted by.

To get a horse to hit a mark without a rider, to get it to stand up, to get it to rear, to get it to pick up a bucket and bring it over is amazing. It's hard work and very rewarding but can be dangerous.

We're living through a time where we are fighting wars fostered by politics, admittedly not on the same scale as the First World War, but with equally tragic realities for our soldiers and their families.

When you start getting jobs, and see your mates from drama school, you don't really want to talk about it, because you have this innate sense of guilt that it's not fair that others aren't doing exactly what you're doing. I do have that.

When you're a kid, 'Star Trek' is a slower burn. It's funny, it's entertaining, but it also has a maturity about it - which is its universal appeal, I think.

Pull the hair on my head the wrong way, and I would be on my knees begging for mercy. I have very sensitive follicles.

Maybe it's because I was an only child, but I've always wanted kids.

My mum and dad had worked incredibly hard to afford me an education.

I realised quite early on that, although I wasn't trying to make a career speciality of it, I was playing slightly asexual, sociopathic intellectuals.

Any privacy in public is a hard thing to negotiate.

As an actor, you are aware of how a role can seep into your real life.

Being a posh actor in England you cannot escape the class-typing from whatever side you look at it.

Do I like being thought of as attractive? I don't know anyone on Earth who doesn't, but I do find it funny.

Enjoy the journey of life and not just the endgame.

Every job is incredibly different, and I love it because you're picking up skill sets and experiences. It's the university of life.

Fame is a weird one. You need to distance yourself from it. People see a value in you that you don't see yourself.

Having your adolescence at an all-male boarding school is just crap.

I am a PR disaster because I talk too much.

I did a lot of acting at school and university, then I went to drama school. It was quite a normal route.

I drag a lot of stuff round with me that I don't need.

I drive a motorbike, so there is the whiff of the grim reaper round every corner, especially in London.

I had the privilege of being able to choose, or at least have the opportunity to work at, being anything but an actor.

I have actual acting scars.

I have an appetite for the normal in my life, as well as the abnormal.

I love doing impersonations of people.

I love theatre, and you learn too much as an actor and enjoy too much of it not to want to go back a lot.

I struggle to learn by rote. I've had meltdowns on set. Which is embarrassing and shameful.

I want to be able to play trailer-bound fatties in a Judd Apatow comedy.

I was always performing, doing silly voices. The teachers realized I could go one of two ways: be creative or destructive.

I was brought up in a world of privilege.