I just love jumping into someone else's life. It is a relatively cheap way to experience things you would be too scared to contemplate in your own life.

In terms of jumping into a character's skin, I try to immerse myself in the role as much as possible to bring me closer to them. All I do is what's required to achieve what I want to achieve.

Method acting is a label I don't really understand, because there's a method to everybody's acting.

Fairfax was incredibly important to the shaping of the country.

I just love jumping into someone else's life. It is a relatively cheap way to experience things you would be too scared to contemplate in your own life.

People go to see a film because it's a great story and it's visually exciting to watch.

Sometimes you just can't walk away from films you're offered, like the Dylan Thomas thing.

Being a salesman and an actor were not that dissimilar: It is a good lesson in covering up your feelings. No one wants to buy from someone who looks depressed.

I'm doing a Dylan Thomas film, Map of Love, with Mick Jagger producing again. It's a wonderful script.

I don't like acting things; I like feeling things.

I got involved in script development from the beginning. It was nice to see how a film gets made right from the beginning. It was quite hands-on for me.

You're making a movie, not a documentary. If you made a film like the historians would like you to make, you're not going to go and see it. I'd rather see paint dry.

It's difficult to get films made, especially films about poets.

Sometimes people say to you that you should try to be in a bigger film, but it's the way it pans out.

I am an actor through and through.

You should be careful what you wish for, as the reasons for war get confused. One person can be very clear in their motives, but others can have different agendas.

Sometimes it is easier to play someone who is far away from you.

What was the reason for invading Iraq' Was it a humanitarian crusade or an economic one' I would be inclined to say the latter. It was the same with the Civil War, because the landed gentry's money was being stolen by the king.

The point is to be involved in the moment.

My focus never wavered; I never accepted the film was not going to be finished.

It quite often happens that they attach a name to a project and it doesn't get all the financing it needs.

The success of the film is down to the crew.

When you do bigger films, the financiers take more risks.

With the situation now, people might be intrigued to see how a country coped with war all those years ago.

I try and do films I know I'm going to enjoy watching as well as being in.

You'd have to have one hell of an imagination to completely make up a story, but historians are very anal about what they think should be portrayed on screen. Thankfully they don't make movies; we do.

You couldn't take football away from me, you couldn't take acting away from me.

You grow up a lot in terms of your understanding of the industry and how to deal with the corporate things.

When I'm playing a character like Jonathan in Ripley's Game I want to be in the moment when he's feeling pain; this very ordinary person who finds himself in extraordinary circumstances.

It's nice to be asked to do good projects.

I tend to do golf charity things because it's much safer and you don't get much chance of a broken arm or leg.

You learn from a conglomeration of the incredible past - whatever experience gotten in any way whatsoever.

I've danced one time in my life. It was the most mortifying experience I ever had.

The experience of life consists of the experience which the spirit has of itself in matter and as matter, in mind and as mind, in emotion, as emotion, etc.

My best film composing experience was with Elia Kazan.

Education is a private matter between the person and the world of knowledge and experience, and has little to do with school or college.

A novel should be an experience and convey an emotional truth rather than arguments.

By experience we find out a short way by a long wandering.

The experience of democracy is like the experience of life itself-always changing, infinite in its variety, sometimes turbulent and all the more valuable for having been tested by adversity.

Learning teacheth more in one year than experience in twenty.

Well, the hardest thing to do, as we know from our own experience on 9/11 is protect everything all the time.

The most important training, though, is to experience life as a writer, questioning everything, inventing multiple explanations for everything. If you do that, all the other things will come; if you don't, there's no hope for you.

When I reached adulthood, even now, I could afford to belong to a country club. But I could never belong to a private club because of my experience as a child, because it would isolate me from the whole of humanity.

No one I know of has ever had this experience-where you had to sit and wait and wait for a DNA test to come back just so you can write the last page of the book.

If you live long enough, you'll experience everything.

Actually I'd had a certain amount of experience in Europe in the inter-war period, as a banker, and I was also a member of the Board of Directors of the International Chamber of Commerce.

In the case of my book, I don't think it's really the coming-out gay novel that everyone really needed, even though it was received as such. The boy is too creepy, he betrays his teacher, the only adult man with whom he's enjoyed a sexual experience, etc.

Well, I go to the theater today, and its curtain - there is no curtain in this play; the lights go down and go up - and we start. And I live this character for two hours. There are only two of us in the play. And It's a complete experience.

Our job as writers and thinkers in the time is how to bring about the occasions that let people have that first-person experience - or the metaphoric experience that allows them to see human continuity as opposed to total threat, total willingness to do violence.