Pretending to be other people is my game and that to me is the essence of the whole business of acting.

I remember once when I told Lindsay Anderson at a party that acting was just a sophisticated way of playing cowboys and Indians he almost had a fit.

My parents felt that acting was far too insecure. Don't ask me what made them think that painting would be more secure.

I turn up in Los Angeles every now and then, so I can get some big money films in order to finance my smaller money films.

It would be difficult to have any unfulfilled ambitions because I don't have any ambitions. I've never been that kind of performer.

I never quite understand why we watch the news. There doesn't really seem much point watching somebody tell you what the news is when you could quite easily listen to it on the radio.

As Beckett said, it's not enough to die, one has to be forgotten as well.

It's an immensely competitive business, and I can tell you the older you get, the parts are fewer, and the people who are proven performers are greater.

Nudes are the greatest to paint. Everything you can find in a landscape or a still life or anything else is there: darkness and light, character dimension, texture. I painted heads too, of course.

Also the wonderful thing about film, you can see light at the end of the tunnel. You did realise that it is going to come to an end at some stage.

I am not an enormous believer in research being the be-all and end-all. I get suspicious when I read about actors spending six months in a clinic, say, in order to play someone who is sick.

I put everything I can into the mulberry of my mind and hope that it is going to ferment and make a decent wine. How that process happens, I'm sorry to tell you I can't describe.

If I'm in theatre, cinema doesn't even cross my mind. Similarly when I'm making a film, theatre doesn't cross my mind.

Pretending to be other people is my game and that to me is the essence of the whole business of acting.

My mother's father drank and her mother was an unhappy, neurotic woman, and I think she has lived all her life afraid of anyone who drinks for fear something like that might happen to her.

I mark a script like an exam, and I try not to do anything under 50 per cent. Similarly with the part. And also film is a peculiar thing, parts don't necessarily read in script form anything like as well as they can do when it comes to materialising.

I never had any ambition to be a star, or whatever it is called, and I'm still embarrassed at the word.

It's quite a dangerous career move to go wilfully on making films that may not find a distributor.

If you do an interview in 1960, something it's bound to change by the year 2000. And if it doesn't, then there's something drastically wrong.

I have lots of favourite memories but I can't say that I have a favourite film.

'The Naked Civil Servant' was as important for me as 'Easy Rider' was for Jack Nicholson. No question.

Acting is an imaginative exercise. It would be odd if you didn't try to identify with the roles you play, but I think I can differentiate between where my imagination is leading me and where I actually am.

Acting is an imaginative leap, really, isn't it? And imaginations prosper in different circumstances.

Actors are not always the best judges. We have a peculiar idea of what we think we are, and sometimes it's best left to others to decide what we play.

Don't forget there are two sides to performing. Finding the truth, but you also have to be transparent enough for the audience to see it. How many times have you seen a performance and thought: 'Well, it seems to be meaning a great deal to you but it ain't coming across to me?' It is to be shared.

Each day, as you get older, there is a new perspective on life. It's a progression of some sort.

Essentially, I am an actor for hire. I am not a rarified creature. I do all these different things, and they all interest me.

Everybody's got to work with Roger Corman. You can't leave out that experience.

Everybody, I think, that was in 'Harry Potter' was certainly introduced to an enormous lot of young people.

Everyone I've ever played has been flawed.

Everything that came to me, in terms of the ritzier side of performing, was a plus.

Film is not literature - the image on screen is the information you get.

For everything that you find dreadful, there's usually something that is rather marvelous as well.

Half the stuff I have done which has been successful would never have been made if it had been shown to focus groups.

How my film career happened, I don't know. It was unplanned. I'd been in films and TV throughout the Sixties and early Seventies, but it was really 'The Naked Civil Servant' in 1975 that put me on the radar.

Human beings are very good at adapting to what happens.

I can't say that I wouldn't prefer to make small films, basically because I think they are probably more interesting in terms of the material. But every now and again, it's quite good to do a big one.

I didn't consider myself to be pretty, not at all.

I didn't want to teach. I wanted to act. It was quite a long and difficult road to get there but very thrilling when I did.

I don't know whether I inspire anything in anyone.

I don't think you automatically become an enlightened person because you are a daddy. But they will change you, of course - their understanding of you puts you in a different place.

I find it hard to imagine that anyone could be intimidated by me.

I first decided that I wanted to act when I was 9. And I was at a very bizarre prep school at the time; to say 'high Anglo-Catholic' would be a real English understatement.

I first got involved with Mel Brooks through 'The Elephant Man.' Everybody knows now, but they didn't know at the time that he was the producer.

I gave up religious thinking a long time ago and am really just an agnostic now.

I have done quite a lot of outsider figures.

I knew I didn't want to pursue an academic career at all, which, of course, my father would have loved me to have done. I didn't want to go to university. The only other thing I could do was paint, and so I went to art school because they couldn't conceive of how one would be an actor.

I knew I wanted to act from a very young age - from about nine, really - but I didn't know how to go about it. I had no idea. The world was a much bigger place then.

I like entertaining. I adore it. I feel I'm in the right place. Without question.