What the nation's built on is discussion, contradiction and growth, and at the moment you can't discuss anything. If you do start to discuss it, you get criticized. If people hate us, you have to find out why and try to solve that problem.

To them though, not to us, we were just a catalyst for their imagination.

Not too much, though there's a certain amount of rancour and bitterness when someone tries to fire you.

The only thing I feel passionate about is my wife.

But no, I love acting, it's a wonderful job.

At my age, you sort of fart your way into a role.

I had a kind of meandering little career, and then I was given a chance to play one of the bottom six in The Dirty Dozen.

No, I'm not rich. I had a tax problem in this country, curiously enough, and my accountant said the British government was patently wrong in taxing me, and they were, but we couldn't persuade them and it cost me everything I had.

I am so glad my wife tolerates me. And we have three wonderful sons.

I have never planned anything. I have been doing this job for over 50 years. I have been paid to work with some wonderful people and it has been a huge gift, to me.

You have a little bit of talent, a certain amount of good fortune and a lot of hard work in pursuit of whatever truth you can find in it, and if you are really lucky, a terrific partner and I have that and those four things worked out for me.

I would look a little silly playing Casanova now.

Vietnam was a lie but at least there was a political agenda. It was the domino theory. Iraq is about nothing but George Bush's ego laced with imperialist ambitions. And it was helped by your government.

I have been able to play a lot of guys and they have kept me working.

But even with no money you could still go to places like the Scotch Club and, you know, John Lennon might be sitting right over there, but I was certainly not a part of any of that circle. I was truly peripheral.

I don't think I have one iota of cynicism about acting.

I love grabbing my wife and going to a distant location to film.

Everything was my fault. I was so dumb. But if I hadn't made the mistakes I made, I wouldn't have met the wonderful woman I've been married to for over 30 years, so I guess that makes the mistakes OK.

What the nation's built on is discussion, contradiction and growth, and at the moment you can't discuss anything. If you do start to discuss it, you get criticized. If people hate us, you have to find out why and try to solve that problem.

Joe Wright called me and I also had some trepidation along those lines but he said no, it would work. He had a very clear and specific idea of what he wanted to do.

The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be.

We are only falsehood, duplicity, contradiction; we both conceal and disguise ourselves from ourselves.

I believe that truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction.

That the sun will not rise tomorrow is no less intelligible a proposition, and implies no more contradiction, than the affirmation, that it will rise.

In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of defeat, but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress toward a victory.

What I claim is to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth.

Good taste and humor are a contradiction in terms, like a chaste whore.

It was not simply out of a spirit of contradiction that I exposed a light source to magnetic forces. The idea came to me during an investigation of the effect discovered by Kerr on light reflected by magnetic mirrors.

There is no contradiction between effective law enforcement and respect for civil and human rights. Dr. King did not stir us to move for our civil rights to have them taken away in these kinds of fashions.

Darwinism as presented by Darwin contradicted idealistic philosophy, and this contradiction grew deeper with the development of its materialist teaching.

Contradiction was something I really like when it is embraced in that kind of philosophy.

I regard the principle of conscription of life as a flat contradiction of all our cherished ideals of individual freedom, democratic liberty and Christian teaching.

Say to all small and great, and that often, that fully, quickly and willingly, without grumbling and contradiction, they do all your commands that are not against God.

We don't perceive a contradiction between writing books, making films or producing a television program. These days you can't choose how you want to express yourself anymore.

It does not seem that the contradiction which exists between the aristocratic function of art and the democratic structure of modern society can ever be resolved.

Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.

There is, I conceive, no contradiction in believing that mind is at once the cause of matter and of the development of individualised human minds through the agency of matter.

He hoped and prayed that there wasn't an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn't an afterlife.

Do what you will, this world's a fiction and is made up of contradiction.

To write a book about improvisation is partly a contradiction in terms. Improvisation is spontaneous. It's in the moment.

Such, Polly, are your sex - part truth, part fiction; - Some thought, much whim and all a contradiction.

The exercise of authority over the same area by two States is a contradiction.

That was my first lesson from Ben-Gurion. Then I saw him making peace, and I saw him making war. He mobilized me before the war. The man was a very rare combination between a real intellectual and a born leader. There is a contradiction between the two.

I now add, farther, that the apostle's argument is so far from proving it to be the duty of people to obey, and submit to, such rulers as act in contradiction to the public good, and so to the design of their office, that it proves the direct contrary.

Men who hold a theory of the Church which excludes from communion those whom they admit to have the Spirit of Christ simply proclaim that their theory is in flat contradiction to the spiritual fact.

We have to acknowledge peace is in danger and mankind still has not realised the priority to be given to world dialogue versus armed contradiction and bloodshed.

When a contradiction is impossible to resolve except by a lie, then we know that it is really a door.

I am the epitome of a walking contradiction for various reasons, only one of which being that I feel my existence is of heaven and hell.

Woman's at best a contradiction still.