There is no defence for my actions which I sincerely regret. [on an affair with nanny Daisy Wright]

I never thought I had to forge a family, but it felt the most natural thing that ever happened to me - meeting someone and becoming a father.

I'm not Tom Cruise. Very few British actors are. If you look at the body of work I've done it's pretty obvious I'm not going to make a 'Mission: Impossible.'

I've always liked what Thomas More said in Utopia, which is that in Utopia every person is allowed their own lifestyle and religion but no one is allowed to stand on a soapbox and tell others that theirs is right. I thought that was brilliant. Brilliant.

I hadn't read or heard a lot about [Tom] Wolfe until I read this script, and in that way I think it was really clever to write a piece about him instead of Max Perkins,[Ernest] Hemingway, [John] Fitzgerald, or others that people have strong opinions of already.

The other nice thing about the robes is that they keep you cool in the summer, and we were filming sometimes in Rome, where it was sometimes over 100 degrees.

I was an optimist, a great champion of the human spirit. And I lost that for a time. I feel like I've regained a bit of that in the last few years but there was a period of my life in which I had a very low opinion of people in general.