Work hard and figure out how to be useful and don't try to imitate anybody else's success. Figure out how to do it for yourself with yourself.

I have children. I have other concerns. I have other focuses. I really feel very sympathetic and I would love to be able to help but I don't see this as the opportunity, having done 'Extraordinary measures', for me to suddenly leap on a soap box and begin to talk about the pharmaceutical industry or the desperate plight of sick children. I do what I can in my world but I don't have the bona fides to do that right now.

If you're going to define me properly, you must think in terms of my failures as well as my successes.

I had no expectation of the level of adulation that would come my way. I just wanted to make a living with a regular role in a television series.

[On being an actor] .nothing more than a worker in a service occupation . It's like being a waiter or a gas station attendant, but I'm waiting on 6 million people in a week if I'm lucky.

When I met scientists, I found them to be as various as any other group of people.

It's the primordial characters [of the Star Wars]. It's the beautiful princess and the callow youth and the smartass that I played and the wise old warrior that Alec Guinness played. And it was a fairy tale. It was a fairy tale.