Love in all eight tones and all five semitones of the word's full octave.

My father was all brain and little heart.

There is so much we can learn from TV. It's a window on the world.

Happiness is no respecter of persons.

If you go looking for loonies and religious fanatics and dropouts and freaks, I dare say you'll find it.

Many people would no more think of entering journalism than the sewage business - which at least does us all some good.

My life, at least, is divided between writing and performing and mixtures of the two.

Oh, it takes a lot for me to walk out of a film.

Somehow, as a writer, you tend to use words to paper over structural cracks.

That one can love another of the same gender, that is what the homophobe really cannot stand.

There's no doubt that I do have extremes of mood that are greater than just about anybody else I know.

You can act in five, six, or seven films in the time it takes to direct one film.

You don't sit down and write a wish list about the person you are going to fall violently in love with. It just doesn't work like that.

I have pushed the boat out as far as I should in terms of taking on too many things. I'm getting older and I just could not take it any more. I am now monitoring myself very closely and I'm just trying not to get into that sort of state again.

As someone who worked hard for a Labour victory in the 90s, do I regret it? Not really. It was bound to happen. And it'll happen with the next government, and the one after it. Because all governments serve us. They serve the filth.

It is exhausting knowing that most of the time the phone rings, most of the time there's an email, most of the time there's a letter, someone wants something of you.

Moving from chair to chair, from coffee machine to coffee machine is the limit of my action in most films. But I enjoy being cast in them because I love watching them.

They are just 100 per cent bear, whereas human beings feel we're not 100 per cent human, that we're always letting ourselves down. We're constantly striving towards something, to some fulfilment.

Having been an actor and a writer for so long - 20 years or so - I felt that it would be daft to go to one's grave without having directed. It's a natural extension of writing and acting, and so I knew it would happen one day.

I feel I would love to close down for a number of years in some way and just be in the country making pork pies and chutneys and never have to poke my head out of the parapet.