If one is going to offer children stories that underneath the story must be something that will inform, stimulate and guide, I love to be on board. I think anything that resonates with history, as does The Jungle Book and Watership Down, reflects patterns of behavior, power struggles, deprivation, migration, survival, joy, love, betrayal, and all of these things. It's tragic that children are encouraged to ignore history. We ignore history and any literature that is historically based in history. Even though both of those films involved animals, of course they reflect human behavior.

I think that most actors, and they're a very strange lot actors, very strange people, but I think that they attempt to keep in touch with the child.

I've met quite a number of people in my career, but I do have an extraordinary memory. And even though they may drift into the periphery of my memory, I can bring them right back when I need them.

What is chess, do you think? Those who play for fun or not at all dismiss it as a game. The ones who devote their lives to it for the most part insist that it's a science. It's neither. Bobby Fischer got underneath it like no one before and found at its center, art.

It's Sir Ben. I've not been a Mister for two years.

I want to play a man in uniform. I've got tremendous respect for that life that they lead. We know so little about it. It's never discussed or talked about, when they come back from battle. I want to examine the choices that have to be made in those terrible times. [...] I'll get to wear a uniform.

I just loved playing a man who was unafraid of making an idiot of himself in the process of falling in love. I found that admirable.