I worked with Lawrence Olivier some years ago. He was a great mentor.

There’s one advantage in having been around as long as I have. Everybody in the Senate knows me, and – I’m going to say something presumptuous, to repeat myself – I think most respect me.

Hillary doesn’t play. She has more experience and exposure to the presidency than any candidate in our lifetime – yes, more than Barack, more than Bill. So she is absolutely ready to be Commander-in-Chief on day one. And, yes, she happens to be a woman.

I have total recall. I remember being born. I remember being in the womb, I remember being inside. Coming out was great.

Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger portion of the truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.

Youth cannot know how age thinks and feels. But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young.

The reward of suffering is experience.

I had rather have a fool to make me merry than experience to make me sad and to travel for it too!

It’s been said that astronomy is a humbling and, I might add, a character-building experience.

If you want to become a great chef, you have to work with great chefs. And that’s exactly what I did.

Flying might not be all plain sailing, but the fun of it is worth the price.

Everyone has been in love, at some point or another.

I’m not a photographer, so I didn’t get into F-stops or ND filters or background, foreground, cross-light, all that stuff. But I was interested in the camera and the lenses. That’s the world that I’m moving in, in terms of acting and giving a performance.

A lot of artists fail when they try to act, and they flop. So when I get into acting, it’s going to be to do it well, something good, something of quality. I want people to say, ‚Wow, that movie‘ – or that show or whatever – ‚turned out really well.‘

You want to play another kind of character in another genre, and it’s been something I’ve been trying to do if I can in the career so far, and it’s something I hope to continue because it’s interesting to me and you get to do different things as an actor.

Whatever is on the page is what I’m married to. I’m very prepared. I’m a thespian. I don’t like to improv. I don’t like to go off course ‚cause I think that’s where stuff happens. When you stick to the material ‚cause it’s written so well, that’s where the magic happens.

Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.

The drama and the trauma of the relationship you have when you’re 16 can mirror the one you have when you’re 26. Life repeats itself.

My experience in Amsterdam is that cyclists ride where the hell they like and aim in a state of rage at all pedestrians while ringing their bell loudly, the concept of avoiding people being foreign to them.

Acting is a nice childish profession – pretending you’re someone else and, at the same time, selling yourself.

When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence and love it.

There’s something about being in front of a live audience that’s fun. It’s a really interesting, very electric, very alive, and intense experience, and you can’t get it anywhere else. And I’ve been doing it since I was 23, so it’s part of my being – it’s part of my fabric as a person.

Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood. All is riddle, and the key to a riddle is another riddle.

On ‚Grey’s Anatomy‘ I wouldn’t care what I was playing – I would play a corpse, ‚cause I love it that much. It is deep true love, and it will never die.

I spent two years in the military service, then I trudged around in repertory for quite a while. I somehow wound up at the National Theatre, though, and then I was definitely on my way.

To be honest with you, when I got into this I never thought about reviews. I never thought about what people would say about me. I was just a young guy who was excited to become a comedian and an actor and I just wanted to get to do what I got to do.

If you want to go somewhere, it is best to find someone who has already been there.

I wish I could give you a lot of advice, based on my experience of winning political debates. But I don’t have that experience. My only experience is at losing them.

‚Leading man‘ just means people want to see you and assume that you can hold a film, carry a movie.

I play a nobody in Japan.

There are worse things in life than death. Have you ever spent an evening with an insurance salesman?

If money is your hope for independence you will never have it. The only real security that a man will have in this world is a reserve of knowledge, experience, and ability.

Love is an emotion that is based on an opinion of women that is impossible for those who have had any experience with them.

I believe in Coach Louis Wong. He is so much more than just a football coach.

No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time.

In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all; and to the young, it comes with bitterest agony because it takes them unawares. I have had experience enough to know what I say.

So I’ve seen life as one long learning process. And if I see – you know, if I fly on somebody else’s airline and find the experience is not a pleasant one, which it wasn’t in – 21 years ago, then I’d think, well, you know, maybe I can create the kind of airline that I’d like to fly on.

Be brave. Take risks. Nothing can substitute experience.

I’ve always felt toward the slightest scene, even if all I had to do in a scene was just to come in and say, ‚Hi,‘ that the people ought to get their money’s worth and that this is an obligation of mine, to give them the best you can get from me.

And so you touch this limit, something happens and you suddenly can go a little bit further. With your mind power, your determination, your instinct, and the experience as well, you can fly very high.

Once you get into this great stream of history, you can’t get out.

Actually, you have to be a little bit in love with your leading man and vice versa. If you’re going to portray love, you have to feel it. You can’t do it any other way. But you don’t carry it beyond the set.

You can know or not know how a car runs and still enjoy riding in a car.

Go up in an airplane. Go high enough, and it’s like we don’t even exist.

You know when you’re young and you see a play in high school, and the guys all have gray in their hair and they’re trying to be old men and they have no idea what that’s like? It’s just that stupid the other way around.

Most people work just hard enough not to get fired and get paid just enough money not to quit.

Acting is just a way of making a living, the family is life.

The mind unlearns with difficulty what it has long learned.

Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience.

Dakota Fanning is a child, but she is a wonderful actor. I don’t know what a child actor is. She’s an actor who’s a child.

You don’t know when you’re being watched. That’s one of the weird things about celebrity. It’s my least favorite part of acting, celebrity.

When you write your first book aged 25 or so, you have 25 years of experience, albeit much of it juvenile experience. The second book comes after an extra year sitting in bookshops. Pretty soon, you begin to run on empty.

Any experience that touches you, in any particular way, is good. It can be a horrible experience.

Forty is the old age of youth, fifty is the youth of old age.

I got a chance to work with Stallone and De Niro – pretty much sums it up for me. You can tell where you’re going in your career by the company you keep.

When you are young you tend to do so many things that are not needed. When you get experience, you know what exactly what works for you and you tend to do things that you want.

There are three kinds of men. The one that learns by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves.

For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it.

Is it not rather what we expect in men, that they should have numerous strands of experience lying side by side and never compare them with each other?

Stand-up can take you in so many different places, man. So many doors can be opened up from stand-up comedy, and the first one that was opened up for me was acting.

Natural abilities are like natural plants, that need pruning by study; and studies themselves do give forth directions too much at large, except they be bounded in by experience.