I'm lucky enough to work with, I think, the greatest writer there's ever been, Shakespeare. Whose collected works would always be under my pillow if I was only ever allowed one book to keep, and who never bores me.

We'll be back. I promise you that.

I mean I think children love the idea that there are different viewpoints and different words for things and different worlds. And the more that they pretend to be other people, the harder it is for them to hate them and misunderstand them when they grow up.

It would've been hard to do something else, to as it were, run away from the circus and become an accountant.

At heart, this job is about continuing to make great theatre for the people of Sheffield - a city I've known and loved since childhood.

I'm not very good at relaxing. Reading's the main thing. On the bus, on the tube, on the loo. Literally all the time. I mean, I don't think there's a moment of the day when I wouldn't be if I was left alone.

I did start reading quite young but I was always read to by my parents, who are both actors. Bedtime stories from when I was about two/three to when I was about 15. In fact they didn't stop until I eventually kind of kicked them out of my bedroom.

I'm lucky enough to work with, I think, the greatest writer there's ever been, Shakespeare. Whose collected works would always be under my pillow if I was only ever allowed one book to keep, and who never bores me.

Books don't exist unless you read them. And it's a two way process - you write the book as you read it and you fill in the gaps. You discover it and you put the marks together and without you doing it they're just marks.

I absolutely love working with my dad because there is such an ease about it, and I also love his company.

I am a coward, basically, but one of the things about acting is that you are always putting yourself through yet another test.

I really do think the things that make our society what it is are under threat. It should be about everyone having the potential to be what they're going to be.

I usually play toffs and soldiers, with a sideline in mass murderers.

I'm rather proud of having been a trainspotter.

If you play a part that's been done before, on stage for instance, you feel like you're carrying a torch and staggering under the weight of it for a bit and then passing it on to somebody else.

Most actors are socialists, aren't they?

Most good art is left wing. It's a moot point whether there is any good right-wing art.

My one remaining professional ambition is to read the shipping forecast. I live in hope.

Of course 'Hamlet' is a debate about the nature and morality of revenge and whether it is right to do something to assuage your angry feelings.

Stamps from Afghanistan are hilarious. You can tell when the revolutions are because suddenly they stop having pictures of the mullahs and the independence monument and they start having fish on them.

The idea that if you are very clever you shouldn't be an actor would be laughable in Russia.

What I do believe is theatre is a medium with a peculiar ability to air vital issues.

When people say, 'If I had my life over again I wouldn't do anything different,' well, I'd do everything differently just for the variety.

When you are in a bad production there are two things you can do. You can do your best or you can leave. I chose to do the third thing which was sulk.

There's a statistical theory that if you gave a million monkeys typewriters and set them to work, they'd eventually come up with the complete works of Shakespeare. Thanks to the Internet, we now know this isn't true.

It was easier to do Shakespeare than a lot of modern movie scripts that are so poorly written.

Find enough clever things to say, and you're a Prime Minister; write them down and you're a Shakespeare.

The English people, a lot of them, would not be able to understand a word of spoken Shakespeare. There are people who do and I'm not denying they exist. But it's a far more philistine country than people think.

A Shakespeare could have arisen only on English soil. In the same way, your great dramatists and poets express the nature and essence of the Norwegian people, but they also express that which is universally valid for all mankind.

Characters are an extreme form in Shakespeare's theater.

Shakespeare, who is probably the greatest writer and poet of the English language, lived in a time that was politically very conservative and it's reflected in his writings.

When Shakespeare was writing, he wasn't writing for stuff to lie on the page; it was supposed to get up and move around.

Shakespeare is the one who gets re-interpreted most frequently.

I do think that, for instance, we've been very lucky to have theatrical careers and be associated with Shakespeare which sometimes gives you a kind of bogus kudos.

I believe that nothing comes of nothing, even in Shakespeare. I wanted to know where he got the matter he was working with and what he did with that matter.

But I don't think there has ever been anything written on the nature of violent man as deep and as thorough as Shakespeare's Titus. I think it puts all modern movies and modern exploitations of violence to shame.

What Shakespeare and the Greeks were able to do was radically question what it meant to be a human being.

I felt a little green, because Shakespeare writes the thought process within the text; it was tricky not to think of what to say and then say it, and instead just deliver the lines.

I've never done anything for money. My first love is things of limited commercial appeal. I could be happy doing Shakespeare for the rest of my life.

An actor should be ready to play any role within reason. For example, I think the most ridiculous thing for me to do would be to try and play Shakespeare.

My background is somewhat unusual, as I trained to be a ballet dancer. I worked in the theatre for eight or nine years as a contemporary dancer. But as an actor one does read Shakespeare and does try to learn the classics.

Shakespeare fascinated me. He hardly ever left the country. His imagination was worldwide though reading.

I acknowledge Shakespeare to be the world's greatest dramatic poet, but regret that no parent could place the uncorrected book in the hands of his daughter, and therefore I have prepared the Family Shakespeare.

Most people don't know that I am an accomplished dramatic actor... But I've performed in several Shakespeare productions including Hamlet, except in this version, Hamlet lives in an apartment with two women, and has to pretend he's gay so that the landlord won't evict him.

I think Freud is about contamination, but I think that is something he learned from Shakespeare, because Shakespeare is about nothing but contamination, you might say.

When I was an undergraduate I had very badly annotated editions of Shakespeare's sonnets, all of which left out the important fact that will has a sexual sense in Shakespeare's sonnets.

First of all, Shakespeare is about pleasure and interest. He was from the first moment he actually wrote something for the stage, and he remains so.

I loved doing Shakespeare. My two favorite roles, in fact, have been Viola in Twelfth Night and Helena in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

The thing that I had saved up for myself and wanted most to bring off was a fully fledged professional production of Hamlet at the Royal Shakespeare Theater in Stratford.