Anyone who can do the splits and come back up on the backbeat, as James Brown and Prince can, has my eternal respect. Prince, who is a genius of the highest order, can come back up while singing and playing the guitar.

You get older and you see yourself and say, 'God, he's old, who's that?'

I am a fan of rehearsal. I like doing it [scene] over and over and over and over until it looks like you never did it before.

I quoted David Hare one of his lines the other day to illuminate whatever point we were trying to make in the conversation, and I said 'What play was that?' and he said 'It was your line, you said it about a hundred and fifty times in The Vertical Hour.'

I don't do plays without jokes anymore. I've retired from those plays. I think it's bad manners to invite people to sit in the dark for two and a half hours and not tell them the joke.

I'm lucky that I get to play a wide variety of parts.

As you get older you feel you need to pay more attention to what is around you and relish it. I'm greedy for beauty.