It's a great privilege just to be in a film not because you're some packaging that some agent has done with the studio exec: "We need a John Travolta film."

If you know someone who’s depressed, please resolve never to ask them why. Depression isn’t a straightforward response to a bad situation; depression just is, like the weather. Try to understand the blackness, lethargy, hopelessness, and loneliness they’re going through. Be there for them when they come through the other side. It’s hard to be a friend to someone who’s depressed, but it is one of the kindest, noblest, and best things you will ever do.

I think my view is that whenever you project into the future you're never likely to be accurate in the details, or the paraphernalia and style. It's in the spirit of it.

We don't stop talking about how the world might be better just because we have no chance of making it to Prime Minister. We are all politicians. We are all artists. In an open society everything the mind and hands can achieve is our birthright. It is up to us to claim it.

Humanism inspires a lot of enthusiasm for everyday life and urges people to be better to one another, to work towards a better future and a common good. If I believed there was an afterlife I would have so much less motive for filling this life with every experience that is offered up to me.

My first words, as I was being born [...] I looked up at my mother and said, 'that's the last time I'm going up one of those.

It was as if he grew his hair long and smoked cigarettes because he liked to, not because he liked being seen to. This was dangerously subversive.