They, all of them, work incredibly hard to make me seem clever and heroic, neither of which I am.

Newton's Third Law of Conversation, if it existed, would hold that every statement implies an equal and opposite statement. To say that I'd turned the offer down raised the possibility that I might not have done.

I feel like I'm working on an oil rig right now. I'm away from home a lot.

One of the principal goals in my life has been to avoid embarrassing my children by doing the job I do. I hope I've managed to do that, and I hope that, with the job I'm in now, they are, if not proud, at least unembarrassed by it. I must say, my three are most agreeable children, who do nothing but delight me.

To be a head boy, you have to be very clever, you have to be a scholar, and I was never a scholar in any shape or form.

I think maybe even one of the reasons I became an actor was actually to hide. I mean, it sounds paradoxical because, of course, people are standing up in a public place and encouraging other people to look at them. So that's not the conventional definition of hiding.

I just read an 800-page history of the Scottish Enlightenment and, honestly, I may as well just start it again now, because I cannot remember a single thing. I can barely remember where Scotland is.