Acting is happy agony.

Love is only one of many passions.

I like to hide behind the characters I play. Despite the public perception, I am a very private person who has a hard time with the fame thing.

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.

I think I have the nicest fans in the world, and I quite like being surrounded by people if we’re all feeling the same emotion in the same room.

Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty.

Acting is the most minor of gifts. After all, Shirley Temple could do it when she was four.

Stage actors are usually much more conscious of speaking up and making sure that everyone can hear in the back of the theatre; a film actor probably thinks of that a little less.

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.

The first magic of love is our ignorance that it can ever end.

Where there is reverence there is fear, but there is not reverence everywhere that there is fear, because fear presumably has a wider extension than reverence.

A broken heart is a very pleasant complaint for a man in London if he has a comfortable income.

Love is the one wild card.

The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.

I can be jubilant one moment and pensive the next, and a cloud could go by and make that happen.

Control thy passions lest they take vengence on thee.

To love is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.

To have in general but little feeling, seems to be the only security against feeling too much on any particular occasion.

There are women who can make you feel more with their bodies and their souls, but these are the exact women who will turn the knife into you right in front of the crowd. Of course, I expect this, but the knife still cuts.

But by reading them again and again finally I was able to grasp the essential part. What emotion, enthusiasm, enlightenment and confidence they communicated to me! I wept for joy.

We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look.

The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.

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.

Doo-wop is special music to me because it’s so straightforward and melody-driven and captures emotions.

Those who don’t know how to weep with their whole heart, don’t know how to laugh either.

I do admire Judi Dench and Sir Ian McKellen, but I’m a philistine. I like the good life too much; I’m not good at going on stage night after night and on wet Wednesday afternoons.

We are more often frightened than hurt; and we suffer more from imagination than from reality.

One good thing about acting in film is that it’s good therapy.

There are so many emotions that you’re feeling, you can get stifled by them if you’re feeling them all at once. What I try to do is take one moment – one simple, simple feeling – and expand it into three-and-a-half minutes.

Jump out the window if you are the object of passion. Flee it if you feel it. Passion goes, boredom remains.

The heart is forever inexperienced.

There is no doubt that some plant food, such as oatmeal, is more economical than meat, and superior to it in regard to both mechanical and mental performance. Such food, moreover, taxes our digestive organs decidedly less, and, in making us more contented and sociable, produces an amount of good difficult to estimate.

O! Let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven; keep me in temper; I would not be mad!

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.

I love playing under pressure. In fact, if there’s no pressure, then I’m not in the perfect zone.

The original ‚Hobbit‘ was never intended to have a sequel – Bilbo ‚remained very happy to the end of his days and those were extraordinarily long‘: a sentence I find an almost insuperable obstacle to a satisfactory link.

Listen with your eyes for feelings.

I had a lovers quarrel with the world.

To wear your heart on your sleeve isn’t a very good plan; you should wear it inside, where it functions best.

I can’t consciously explain how people feel after reading my books. All is too personal.

The spirit desires to remain with its body, because, without the organic instruments of that body, it can neither act, nor feel anything.

A chorus is not easy.

As soon as I hear a sound, it always suggests a mood to me.

The beauty of me being on stage is I have a voice.

Love is an interesting thing.

I would love to sign on to do a movie if it was the right role and if it was the right script, because I would be taking time away from music to tell a big grand story, and spend all of my time and pouring all of my emotions into being someone else. So for me to do that, it would have to be a story worth telling.

I like to write about love and love lost because I feel like there are so many different subcategories of emotions that you can possibly delve into.

When I grew up, the Devil was a reason why I had a headache or the Devil was the reason I got mad today. We always blamed the Devil. I think today when I say the Enemy, I like to make it broader. Sometimes the Enemy can be our own thoughts.

For more than a decade, I led an organization that put on an elaborate Christmas program each December. It was a big production, with over 250 people participating in more than 20 performances. By the end of the season, everyone who participated was exhausted.

No matter how dull, or how mean, or how wise a man is, he feels that happiness is his indisputable right.

There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something we’d all love one another.

I have no human feelings.

One is never afraid of the unknown; one is afraid of the known coming to an end.

We do not hate as long as we still attach a lesser value, but only when we attach an equal or a greater value.

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.

I’ve always had to conquer fear when I’m on stage. Basically, I was and still am a very shy person. It’s absolutely in conflict with what I do. But once I deliver the first joke I’m okay. It’s like I’m out there all by myself just delivering my lines to nobody in particular without ever trying to notice the audience in front of me.

Since it is difficult to join them together, it is safer to be feared than to be loved when one of the two must be lacking.

Ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.

Our envy always lasts longer than the happiness of those we envy.

There is but one stage for the peasant and the actor.

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.