I'm the world's worst bearer of grudges. I'm sure I'll be bearing grudges and paying off old scores on my death-bed.

I can't actually see myself putting make-up on my face at the age of sixty, but I can see myself going on a camel train to Samarkand.

ability atrophies through lack of exercise.

I'm less confident now than I've ever been. In this peculiar craft, confidence is something you spend a lifetime losing. I used to be frightened only one night a week but now I'm frightened of every performance. I mean really frightened.

If, as an actor, you allow yourself to be cocooned from the boring pin-pricks of day-to-day existence - like standing in a queue at the butcher's or any of the other dreary little events that we all have in our daily lives - you begin to lose your lifeline to what people are. And if you lose that, you eventually lose the ability to act.

You'd think is something one would grow out of. But you grow into it. The more you do, the more you realize how painfully easy it is to be lousy and how very difficult to be good.

To have something which one particularly wants to do is more important than anything else. It is even more important than succeeding in that thing you want to do. In fact it does not matter if you fail, but it does matter that you do or do not want to do something.