I think you can fan the flames, but I think in the same way that a mathematician is a mathematician - He's not taught to be a mathematician. He either has a feeling for equations and an understanding and delight in it, not only in the purity of it, but in its beauty as well.

I find it difficult to say, like "which child do you prefer the most", and its a sort of surface choice. I've never known how to quite answer that one adequately.

Anything which retains interest is optimistic. When the characters become disinterested, it's pessimistic. Does that make sense?

[Alfred] Hitchcock was very interested in the image on the screen.As is any good cinema director. That is the language they speak. It is not literature, it is images on screen.

I think you can get better in mathematics on a school level, but when you're talking about being a mathematician, I think that's definitely a gift of genes or whatever.

There is always a better choice that you were unable to quite touch with a single stroke. Even in acting, there comes a point, like a painting, where you have to say, "That's it. I can't go any further with it." And sometimes, you say, "I'm really pleased that that's where it's finished up." Other times, you think, "I don't think I really quite got there, but I haven't got time to go any further." Rather reluctantly, you have to say "That's it."

It's quite interesting, looking back at the first one [film about Harry Potter], nobody knew whether or not it was going to be successful as a film. The books were of course already very successful, but that's happened before, where the books were successful and the films weren't at all. But it turned out that they were.