If you have a certain wildness of spirit, a cabinet maker's workshop is not the place to express it.

I didn't like the idea of being foolish, but I learned pretty soon that it was essential to fail and be foolish.

It didn't occur to me that it was possible to breathe life into Abraham Lincoln.

One of the great privileges of having grown up in a middle-class literary English household, but having gone to school in the front lines in Southeast London, was that I became half-street-urchin and half-good-boy at home. I knew that dichotomy was possible.

Germans don't speak in a German accent, they just speak German.

I'm a little bit perverse, and I just hate doing the thing that's the most obvious.

Everybody has to know for themselves what they're capable of.