I’m not Russell Crowe. I’m not going to do a period piece.

My folks always let me go to the movies every Saturday. We were really motion-picture goers.

The skin of my character in ‚The Man Who Fell to Earth‘ was some concoction, a spermatozoon of an alien nature that was obscene and weird-looking.

I’m not really an actor, I’m a reactor; I’m a pitchman. That’s what I do best. Nobody can do it any better.

So there’s nothing more provocative than taking a genre that everybody who’s cool hates – and then making it cool.

Everybody accuses me of moving fast when I direct a picture. I don’t move fast, but I just keep moving.

One of the great pleasures of going to see a Daniel Day-Lewis film: you haven’t seen him in five years. Where have you been? So, it’s a special event, right? Well, if you want to go see a movie that I’m in, it still may be a special event for you, but, you don’t feel like you don’t know where I’ve been.

There is good and mediocre writing within every genre.

I want to be an Asian Robert De Niro.

I want to try something different in Hollywood, to tell the audience I am not just an actor star – I am an actor, too.

The knighthood was a tremendous honour, I don’t dismiss it. But I feel embarrassed by the flowery, theatrical stuff that goes with being an actor.

I don’t watch television and I rarely go to the cinema, but I recently watched ‚The King’s Speech‘ on a flight. It was so beautiful and so simple.

Oh yes. I’m an actor, so I just learn my lines, and show up and do it. I gave it a little bit of thought.

I enjoyed working with Stephen Merchant. He was wonderful. I’ve been such a big fan of his acting.

No, I can’t do rap music!

I got started as an actor when I was 12.

I have kind of a funny relationship with movies. I don’t have to see the whole movie to get an impression of it or to let it have an influence on me.

I’m proud to be an actor. See, as an actor, you live longer. Football players, the brain and all that stuff, ooh-eee, that’s not good.

I do have tatoos, and I do wear leather, but there are other sides of me, that my film express.

I like Italian movies. I was frequently there in the ’60s, in Rome and the vicinity. It was a great period in life. I was very influenced by their stuff.

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.

If you look at me in ‚Ride Along,‘ even though I’m playing two different characters, my demeanor and my tone were not aggressive.

I’ve known Ben Stiller for a minute. One of my first movies was ‚Along Came Polly.‘

I like to change characters and then, slowly I believe the audience treat me as, like an actor who can fight. It’s not like an action star.

While we look to the dramatist to give romance to realism, we ask of the actor to give realism to romance.

I’ve always said the one advantage an actor has of converting to a director is that he’s been in front of the camera. He doesn’t have to get in front of the camera again, subliminally or otherwise.

I love good film, whether it’s an independent or studio film. The independent films, I think the good ones aren’t necessarily eccentric ones but they’re the more specific ones.

As much as I love the Western genre, I figured if I kept doing those, I’d eventually run out of steam on that, and that would’ve been the end of it.

It’s easy to become very self-critical when you’re an actor. Then you get critiqued by the critics. Whether you agree with them or not, people are passing judgment on you.

Movies were invented for Jimmy Cagney, and he was invented for the movies. A perfect match.

Well, in order for me to be successful… In order to be a great artist – musician, actor, painter, whatever – you must be able to be private in public at all times.

I was lousy in school. Real screwed-up. A moron. I was antisocial and didn’t bother with the other kids. A really bad student. I didn’t have any brains. I didn’t know what I was doing there. That’s why I became an actor.

When you’re doing a film and the majority of the film is cast black, for me, it’s most important to get people to view those movies as just movies, as just good movies. At the end of the day, regardless of the color of the cast, we’re all doing the same thing in this business: trying to make a good film.

I’ve always wanted to do a family movie.

We lived in a tall, narrow Victorian house, which my parents had bought very cheaply during the war, when everyone thought London was going to be bombed flat. In fact, a V-2 rocket landed a few houses away from ours. I was away with my mother and sister at the time, but my father was in the house.

Morgan Freeman is so class. He’s so cool. He’s so scary.

The secret to film is that it’s an illusion.

Whenever I think about movies, I always look at that art process as having the best of a lot of worlds. Because if you watch a great film, you have a musical element to it, not just on the scoring, but in the way that the shots are edited – that has music and rhythm and time.

In those days, the early 1980s, TV and film were interchangeable.

I saw ‚Magic Mike,‘ and I thought it was great.

There’s no real excuse for being successful enough as an actor to do what you want and then selling out. You do it pure. You don’t try to adapt it, make it commercial.

Yes, I’m always – I’m always surprised when you make a film and you live with it a while and you put it out, you never dream that anybody is ever going to want to really see it.

Funk, I don’t think I have anything to do with funk. I’ve never considered myself funky.

Actors I admire? Ed Harris, or course, I think he’s terrific; because I know he always had to fight being what he looked like a lot, but I think he’s a terrific actor.

Years ago I met Richard Burton in Port Talbot, my home town, and afterwards he passed in his car with his wife, and I thought, ‚I want to get out and become like him‘. Not because of Wales, because I love Wales, but because I was so limited as a child at school and so bereft and lonely, and I thought becoming an actor would do that.

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.‘

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

In order for me to be successful… In order to be a great artist – musician, actor, painter, whatever – you must be able to be private in public at all times. That is what we do.

The life of an action star is very short. I want to be an actor like Robert De Niro, like Dustin Hoffman or Clint Eastwood who in their 70s or 80s can still act.

When you are an actor, you have to stay inside this world, but when you are with the crew, on the outside, you are in the dirt, working through all the issues. It’s just a different way of working, and I think I preferred it.

‚Rocky‘ and ‚Rocky III‘ were the best.

I like Ryan Gosling as an actor. I watch all of his movies, and he’s Canadian and I just like his swag. I read his interviews and I’m a big fan of his.

I think that technology is always invented for historical reasons, to solve a historical problem. But they very soon reveal themselves to be capable of doing things that aren’t historical that nobody had ever thought of doing before.

An actor is supposed to be a sensitive instrument.

My favorite movies of all times is ‚Doctor Zhivago,‘ and I love ‚Gone With the Wind.‘ I’d love to play some Southern belle or something where I owned a plantation.

I wouldn’t put myself forward to do a film like ‚Changeling‘ if I thought I couldn’t pull people into a story because of all the other ways people see me.

I think – I don’t know, maybe it’s nostalgia. But the choice, losing the choice to be able to use film is going to be – it’s gone. It’s going to be gone.

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

I love Steve Carell.

I am a fan of the ‚Rocky‘ films, and ‚Rocky 4‘ is my favourite. I also like ‚The Warriors.‘

If you look at my job, my union card, it says ‚actor.‘ It don’t say nothing about celebrity, movie star, nothing like that, and that’s one thing that keeps me humble.