I constantly experience failure in that my work is never as good as I want it to be. So I live with failure.

I've never been passionate about acting, and I find more and more that I work to live the life I want to live. [...] There's something about the detachment I have, the feeling of the lack of importance about what I do, that is healthy.

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.

I've actually always been fussy about the work I do.

Mine is an actor's voice, not a singer's voice, but the part was written for an actor (Richard Burton), not a singer.

I certainly play people on the edge quite a lot. I am interested in what makes people odd and what makes them different. In life I try to play the edges. I have a horror of the herd. There are many, many different sorts of people. A lot of people are fairly uninteresting. I want to play the interesting ones. The villains are always more interesting to portray. Shakespeare knew that.