Bleak House is just the most astounding piece of work. There's huge, visionary poetry in it.

He spent hours and hours and hours practising these conjuring tricks. It's just such a curious thing.

When the BBC decided to bring Doctor Who back as a feature film a few years ago, one national newspaper ran a poll to ask its readers who should be the new Doctor, and I topped it.

Bleak House is just the most astounding piece of work. There's huge, visionary poetry in it.

He invented this idea of telling the life story of a great writer through becoming his characters and becoming him. It was such a pleasure and I thought we must find another writer.

I get sent a lot of scripts which feature him as a kind of all-purpose Victorian literary character and really understand little, if anything, about him, his life or his books.

He always describes his characters' voices and their physique so brilliantly. As people have said, they are cartoons, caricatures. They're grotesques really.

Childhood didn't have a big influence on me, really - in fact I spent most of it plotting how to escape.

Everything that we have gone through, are going through, and will go through is there in Shakespeare. It is all of human life.

I am never bored, never short of anything to do and I don't even ever feel lonely. I am quite gregarious and I get out and about a lot, but sometimes it is just wonderful to be on your own.

I don't practise any religion but I am deeply interested in the answers that mankind has come up with to explain the human situation.

I hated Sundays when I was growing up in Streatham, south London. Everything closed down and stopped.

I love storytelling and I love just relating directly to an audience. That's why we do theatre, it's because we love contact with the audience. We love the fact that the audience will change us. The way the audience responds makes us change our performance.

I would say critically of myself that I am somebody without secrets. Sometimes acting depends on you having a secret. I don't think I've ever had that.

I've come to this conclusion: What makes a great actor is great need. A huge need of acting.

Increasingly I've come to think that what's at the core of acting is thinking. Most people would say it's feeling.

Jesus is absolutely at the centre of Western civilisation and part of my fascination with him is, why? What is it about this particular man and his story?

Like many Catholics, I was very affected by the personality of Jesus and that impression, pious as it was, has stayed with me.

Many actors have protested about mobile phones going off in theatres, but the real menace now is people texting during a show. It may only disturb a few people around them, but for me, as an actor, when I spot them answering their emails, I am outraged.

My mother wanted me to be a teacher. She had this vision of me walking across the quadrangle in an Oxford college wearing my academic gown.

Shakespeare speaks for the human heart but Dickens speaks for the social man and for injustices.

Shakespeare wrote all there is that we need to know about dementia in 'King Lear.'

The elderly are all someone's flesh and blood and we cannot just shut them in a cupboard and hand over the responsibility for taking care of them to the state.

To live another person's life is quite a weird thing.

Very often my weekends are spent performing on Saturday, on stage in the afternoon and again in the evening.

When children have grieving parents it's also common for them to feel an obligation to cheer them up and make them happy.

You could say Shakespeare is so extraordinary precisely because he was so ordinary. He had all the usual anxieties and understandings of what it is to have children, lose children, get married, struggle to make a living and so on.

Still, language is resilient, and poetry when it is pressured simply goes underground.

I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests.

Art: If the object of poetry is, to make men, then poetry is the heir of prophecy.

I want to promote poetry to the point where you got all the baldhead kids running around doing poetry, getting the music out of the way and having only words, the spoken word, and then see what happens.

But in the finished art of the song the use of words has no connection with the use of words in poetry.

The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual.

Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language.

There is probably nothing wrong with art for art's sake if we take the phrase seriously, and not take it to mean the kind of poetry written in England forty years ago.

Because people are very interested in my poetry, in what I say.

The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.

It is the timber of poetry that wears most surely, and there is no timber that has not strong roots among the clay and worms.

I was reading the poems of Rochester. Rochester made himself out to be bisexual, but I think that was only to shock. Most of his poetry is sexual, even pornographic.

For me concrete poetry was a particular way of using language which came out of a particular feeling, and I don't have control over whether this feeling is in me or not.

Poetry is fascinating. As soon as it begins the poetry has changed the thing into something extra, and somehow prose can go over into poetry.

Poetry is an art, the easiest to dabble in, but the hardest to reach true excellence.

Write verse, not poetry. The public wants verse. If you have a talent for poetry, then don't by any means mother it, but try your hand at verse.

Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry.

To know anything of a poet but his poetry is, so far as the poetry is concerned, to know something that may be entertaining, even delightful, but is certainly inessential.

Lapped in poetry, wrapped in the picturesque, armed with logical sentences and inalienable words.

I don't know a better preparation for life than a love of poetry and a good digestion.

On the other hand, if there's an underlying core of poetry that I go to, I go to the sea. I've lived on the sea all my life. I live on the sea in Cape Breton.

There is one type of ideal woman very seldom described in poetry - the old maid, the woman whom sorrow or misfortune prevents from fulfilling her natural destiny.