You get paid the same for a bad film as you do for a good one.

I come from the slums; I come from a hard background; I come from a poor family; and I was a soldier.

I regard myself as someone who is retired but who occasionally goes out to work. In fact, I'm offered so much good stuff that it's not so occasional.

Be patient.Of course it will come. It took me years to get an Oscar.

I've been acting a long time, and I can play a Cockney gangster or a womanizer in my sleep or standing on my head. But what I try to do is I try to find characters that are as far away from me as I possibly can and then make them real. A French Nazi is about as far away from me as I can possibly get without actually going to Mars or something.

I've always got to have one impossible dream on the back burner.

Alfie was the first time I was above the title; the first time I became a star in America.