My role 14 years ago in Richard III – that was the first time I played a bad guy and learned a lot about it – they have all the fun!

Heroes need monsters to establish their heroic credentials. You need something scary to overcome.

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.

The Italians and Spanish, the Chinese and Vietnamese see food as part of a larger, more essential and pleasurable part of daily life. Not as an experience to be collected or bragged about – or as a ritual like filling up a car – but as something else that gives pleasure, like sex or music, or a good nap in the afternoon.

It was the experience of mystery – even if mixed with fear – that engendered religion.

I’m not actually a very keen performer. I like putting shows together. I like putting events together. In fact, everything I do is about the conceptualizing and realization of a piece of work, whether it’s the recording or the performance side.

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.

My experience of malaria was just taking anti-malarials, which give you strange dreams, because I don’t want to get malaria.

I don’t think that experience is a very useful or convincing attribute for a sensible foreign policy. Henry Kissinger had a lot of experience.

You don’t learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing, and by falling over.

I do not like to repeat successes, I like to go on to other things.

It’s nice to finally get scripts offered to me that aren’t the ones Tom Hanks wipes his butt with.

He that gives good advice, builds with one hand; he that gives good counsel and example, builds with both; but he that gives good admonition and bad example, builds with one hand and pulls down with the other.

To err is human; to forgive, divine.

Every human being is under construction from conception to death.

How we experience memory sometimes, it’s not linear. We’re not telling the stories to ourselves. We know the story; we’re just seeing it in flashes overlaid.

I grow daily to honour facts more and more, and theory less and less. A fact, it seems to me, is a great thing; a sentence printed, if not by God, then at least by the Devil.

Our experience of any painting is always the latest line in a long conversation we’ve been having with painting. There’s no way of looking at art as though you hadn’t seen art before.

Sweet is the memory of past troubles.

The art of acting is not to act. Once you show them more, what you show them, in fact is bad acting.

The smallest seed of faith is better than the largest fruit of happiness.

We all need people who will give us feedback. That’s how we improve.

I can’t make a song for a particular person or demographic. If I love it, I’m gonna do it. I have to perform it for the rest of my life. A song is like a tattoo – you can never get away from it.

My business acumen is definitely growing.

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.

He ate and drank the precious Words, his Spirit grew robust; He knew no more that he was poor, nor that his frame was Dust.

On the field, aggression can sometimes be a positive emotion. It boosts performance and can lift your game. But over the years, I have learnt that restrained aggression is a better animal. That way, you will conserve your energy and won’t spend yourself quickly.

People invest in businesses that they believe have the leadership, mission and team to grow and operate profitably.

You’ve got to learn to survive a defeat. That’s when you develop character.

The best measure of a man’s honesty isn’t his income tax return. It’s the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.

I’ve been around longer than most of my fans have been alive.

You cannot be a hero without being a coward.

Why, except as a means of livelihood, a man should desire to act on the stage when he has the whole world to act in, is not clear to me.

Much of your pain is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self.

I learned how important it is to entertain people and give them a reason to come and watch you play.

Being a good husband is like being a good stand-up comic – you need ten years before you can even call yourself a beginner.

I have never entered into any controversy in defense of my philosophical opinions; I leave them to take their chance in the world. If they are right, truth and experience will support them; if wrong, they ought to be refuted and rejected. Disputes are apt to sour one’s temper and disturb one’s quiet.

At twenty years of age the will reigns; at thirty, the wit; and at forty, the judgment.

I’ve 20,000 hours of clinical practice; you’re not naive after the first few thousand. I’ve helped people deal with things that most people can’t imagine.

There are a whole bunch of roles where people say, ‚Oh, you’re playing yourself.‘ I guess it’s kind of a compliment. Or people say, ‚Oh, man, you just roll out of bed and do that.‘ The work is to make it look effortless. That’s the hard part.

I never wanted to sing. I just wanted to play rhythm guitar – hide in the back and just play.

The prospect of dating someone in her twenties becomes less appealing as you get older. At some point in your life, your tolerance level goes down and you realize that, with someone much younger, there’s nothing really to talk about.

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.

Singing into a microphone and learning to play an instrument – learning to do your craft – that’s the most important thing! It’s not about what goes on in a computer!

To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.

It’s very rare that you get a director that lets you be creative and bring what you feel your character should do or should be.

Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time.

To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced.

On ‚Think Like a Man,‘ they got the best out of me because they allowed me to bring my own cadences and opinions to the character that I was playing. I think we got the best of that particular character.

Senator Kerry has been in Washington long enough to take both sides on just about every issue.

Competition has been shown to be useful up to a certain point and no further, but cooperation, which is the thing we must strive for today, begins where competition leaves off.

Experience does not err. Only your judgments err by expecting from her what is not in her power.

My act is an exaggeration of a part of me. I’m much more expressive off stage.

I seem to be getting a lot of things pushed my way that are strong women. It’s like people see Hackers and they send me offers to play tough women with guns, the kind who wear no bra and a little tank top. I’d like to play strong women who are also very feminine.

Perception often lags behind reality, and I can say from experience that the vast majority of public officials in Louisiana are much better than our reputation holds us to be.

Every time I get in the McLaren I feel more comfortable, my confidence increases and I feel more at home with the team.

The strongest principle of growth lies in the human choice.

Love is like a friendship caught on fire. In the beginning a flame, very pretty, often hot and fierce, but still only light and flickering. As love grows older, our hearts mature and our love becomes as coals, deep-burning and unquenchable.

If everything was perfect, you would never learn and you would never grow.

In business, the idea of measuring what you are doing, picking the measurements that count like customer satisfaction and performance… you thrive on that.

I get so excited when a song I wrote that’s very personal to me goes No. 1 and I look down and see people singing the words back to me.