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 wanted to be a journalist, I thought it was glamorous and that I'd meet beautiful women in the rain.

I guess part of the hit-man appeal is the solitude. Everybody is lured to the idea of the solitary life.

When people warned me there would be long periods out of work if I became an actor, I couldn't keep a straight face because that was exactly what I had in mind.

A way of describing performances that I admire is that there is an absence of careerism. It's a clumsy way of describing it but it sort of does it for me.

One of the things that is assumed about actors is that they are extrovert, which is almost never the case, in my experience.

Actors always talk about taking their work home and I always think: 'What are you on? You just turn it off. You are at work and then you go home.'