When you start playing a character every day for seven weeks, it suddenly starts becoming easier.

With theatre especially, you don't want to do it unless you love it - there's no way you can pull it off, making people happy, making yourself happy for 12 weeks or whatever.

It's so silly isn't it? how we grown men take up trout angling not simply to pursue trout but to find some place, some special place, where we feel at ease. a place to belong. Forces, not forms, persist: energy is spent and endures; time does not tick, it flows. God loves a man that smells of trout water and mountain meadows. Which way's heaven, you suppose? Follow the trail and keep close to the stream.

What doesn't draw you into a Coen Bros. movie. It's amazing. I can't believe it! They're the Coen Bros. It's ridiculous.

I'm more the sort of person who doesn't like hugging strangers because we don't know each other, so we shouldn't.

I'm not great at having my picture taken and I don't enjoy that side of it very much but I enjoy being with my friends and it's nice to have a reunion.

My agent in London told me, after Never Let Me Go, because I loved doing that so much, "If you're on a lucky streak and you're doing well, you should only take a part, if you can't bear the idea of anyone else doing it." That's been the case since then, with Drive and Shame and the play (The Seagull), and the stuff that's going on, like Gatsby. I would have been devastated, if I hadn't gotten those jobs.