Somebody doing something effortlessly is a lovely thing to watch.

I think the older I get, the less I should be doing.

If you look around us, there are an awful lot of men out there, and women, but mostly men, who believe that they have got a fast-track path to Heaven, if they do the things that they believe God is telling them to do, and I don't just mean Islamic people. I mean Fundamentalist Christians.

If you're going to lead people, you better know how to manipulate people, and you have to be pretty smart to be able to do that.

I really do want to just be able to sit in the corner of the pub with my friends... to just be an actor and still go to the supermarket and not get bothered.

Violence is a very ugly thing. Violence is often so casual on film, and made to look so cool and so sexy, but violence is a repulsive, repugnant act that human beings inflict on each other. It shouldn't seem to be cool and sexy, ever really.

One of the things I like about doing historical films is drawing the line between now and then.