The fact is that in England so many of our politicians are career politicians - they've always been politicians since they left their education. And in the old days of course politicians used to be fish mongers or doctors or whatever. They'd lived life. These days, power seems to go to the hands of people that that's all they've done. And I'm not sure that's a good thing, because it does remove them from the realities of life.

I think nobody since has written such extraordinary work as Shakespeare writes. The characters he writes are full of inconsistencies, which is a great human quality - I mean we're all very inconsistent in the way we behave.

It's just money; it's made up. Pieces of paper with pictures on it so we don't have to kill each other just to get something to eat.

It's always useful to be in big movies for one's career.

Anywhere I can ski in the morning and sell a movie in the afternoon is good.

Americans enjoy uniformity in a way that the British don't; they wanted everybody of a sort of nice chorus line height and here I was, this person who was a good three inches taller than anyone else on the end of the line.

I try to avoid doing movies where I act with tennis balls. It's ultimately incredibly tedious.