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.

I'm besotted by [Kirsten Dunst] now. I think she's just wonderful. I can't think for a second that however much she'd worked in America, she would never have had the chance to play [a role in Lars Von Trier's 'Melancholia' ] like that. You have to get outside of the States to do something like that.

I think particularly Daniel [Radcliffe], he knows what he's doing. I'm sure he'll finish up a producer. He really realized what it was, knew the size of it. And it was gigantic, the biggest franchise [Harry Potter] in history.

I loathed school. I don't have an academic mind, and besides I was so bored by my teachers! How teachers can take a child's inventiveness and say yes, yes, in that pontifical way of theirs, and smother everything!

People say you never retire in this [film] business and I say, well, not until they retire you.

I think it would be very difficult to play somebody if they didn't think they had any virtues or redeeming characteristics.

The great joke is that a realist is an optimistic pessimist. That's very witty. Whether it's truthful or not, that I don't know.