He has such a patronizing tone and manner, and such a sarcastic sense of humor. I found him rather brutal, a kind of elegant brutality which appealed. No, I think he came pretty much off the page.

I was born in 1961. Now I think the 16 years that elapsed between 1961 and the end of the wars is nothing. To a child growing up it felt like an eternity, an entirely different world.

I always want to do things that are different. I don't want to be doing the same thing, the same performance constantly, and it feels like most people tell you that they are the same. However different you feel might approach them.

I did decide that you have to put your name about a bit, and so, although I would have preferred to have never done publicity or an interview or a fashion shoot for a magazine or a chat show.

I would have loved to have met some former spies, but they don't readily advertise themselves unless they're not living in Moscow, and even then. I'm sure I've met some without realizing it.

I'm just a hired actor who was hired for a particular job, but I think one of the joys of reading the script was the way that the personal and the global are woven together.

It's taken me longer still to realize what a short span there is between those life experiences and the rest of your life. That's a job for the people who lived through it.

I've never had a huge circle of friends. I can't spread myself that thin and go 100 million miles an hour all the time. I choose to give truly of myself, entirely of myself, to the people I choose to do that with, and I can't do that with everyone.

Surely the job of fiction is to actually tell the truth. It's a paradox that's at the heart of any kind of storytelling.

As an actor, you ask yourself what you can do to put yourself in a position where you can play that role.

I don't consider 41 being in prime of life. Even if I conceived a child tomorrow I'd be 52 by the time it was 10. I'm not sure I'd have the energy, and I find that quite scary.

I never want to sort of put all the cards on the table all at once, because that's somehow there's always a journey to go on. There's always something to be revealed, in my mind, about characters.

I've never had a desire to be famous. Lots of actors are actually extremely shy. I have shy areas.

I'd always liked the idea that drama acts at its best as a kind of arena for debate, not just about the thing itself, but also producing aesthetic, stylistic, political and moral discussions.

All the great novels, all the great films, all the great dramas are fictions that actually tell us the truth about us or about human nature or about human situations without being tied into the minutia of documentary events. Otherwise we might as well just make documentaries.

I think one probably absorbs things like a sponge and things emerge without your always being aware of it.

The Jungian view of drama would be that it affects all of our imaginations and somehow taps into our hidden, ancient, primordial memories.

I don't have the energy or the mental security to get involved with all that. I think it's a good idea to be able to disappear into the story, so that the first thing the audience sees isn't you, but the part.

There's so much of, it could have been a very critical examination of what happened, and really the emotional lives of the people involved sort of carry the characters forward.

Our attitudes have changed a lot, really, and so there's a certain toughness about it.

My dad served in the Air Force as ground crew for several years, and doesn't really talk about it. I know that it's there. I think my main thing about direct or indirect experiences as near to home as it were is the idea of self-sacrifice really.

Years and years ago, when everyone knew that Pierce was going to be doing the job, they started selecting new people. I had this bizarre thing when I hadn't done many movies, and of going on for an interview.

He has such a patronizing tone and manner, and such a sarcastic sense of humor. I found him rather brutal, a kind of elegant brutality which appealed. No, I think he came pretty much off the page.

I read about this hotel that was great, down in the south of the island, not in a touristy area. I had no particular desire ever to go to Jamaica, but I thought, what the hell? Sounds nice. Let's go!

People will say that it's some kind of evasion, but I would never want to have a kid for me. I'd want to have the child for the child's sake, if that makes sense.

The space and light up there in Norfolk is wonderfully peaceful. I find myself doing funny things like gardening, and cooking, which I rarely do in London.

Men live by intervals of reason under the sovereignty of humor and passion.

Humor can help you cope with the unbearable so that you can stay on the bright side of things until the bright side actually comes along.

It is the ability to take a joke, not make one, that proves you have a sense of humor.

What we're doing is fun - if you have any sense of humor at all!

You've got to have a sense of humor to keep your sanity.

I don't think I could ever do a network sitcom because the humor is often based on some trite circumstance. I don't want to be a part of a show where it's mostly about coming up with the jokes.

All my jobs have been with food in one way or another since 1948. My parents were in the hotel business, and I just loved the warm hearted people who worked so hard with such good humor.

You can turn painful situations around through laughter. If you can find humor in anything, even poverty, you can survive it.

The man with the real sense of humor is the man who can put himself in the spectator's place and laugh at his own misfortune.

Advertisers also know that humor can help bond us to their product.

I am a great believer that what makes our show different is the humor.

The comic is the perception of the opposite; humor is the feeling of it.

Through humor, you can soften some of the worst blows that life delivers. And once you find laughter, no matter how painful your situation might be, you can survive it.

Once we got over the origin story, we could really delve deeper into their lives and characters and angst. So this movie actually has more heart, more humor.

Incongruity, they say, is one of the main ingredients of humor. Maybe it's because everybody can feel superior to me. I honestly don't know.

I love Sell Out, I think it's great. I love the jingles. The whole thing as an album is a wonderful piece of work. The cover. Everything about it. It's got humor, great songs, irony.

In some sort of crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.

I'm not for gratuitous nudity, but if there's humor, I don't have a problem.

It felt as if things were literally slipping through my fingers. Things were just streaming away from me. I lost my sense of humor. I'm still looking for that.

Robert Walker as Bruno was excellent. He had elegance and humor, and the proper fondness for his mother.

I'm not really big on slapstick humor. I like gentle humor.

But it also became the experience, or was the experience, of the writers who were attracted to this kind of humor. They're all men or women who come from the same kind of experience in their own lives.

Puns are a form of humor with words.