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

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.

This November, with the re-election of President Barack Obama, this generation of Americans will ever expand upon the hope, the truth and the promise of America.

It the British System is the most gigantic system of slavery the world has yet seen, and therefore it is that freedom gradually disappears from every country over which England is enabled to obtain control.

Such as have reason, understanding, or common sense, will, and ought to make use of it in those things that concern themselves and their posterity, and suspect the words of such as are interested in deceiving or persuading them not to see with their own eyes.

I'm all for ambition and stretch goals. I set them for myself. But leadership isn't the same as cheerleading. Believing in something is a necessary but absolutely insufficient condition for making it come true.

The reason is that they define how I have gone about my business. I have trusted to intuition. I did it at the beginning. I do it even now. I have no idea how things might turn out, where in my writing I might go next.

It's no accident many accuse me of conducting public affairs with my heart instead of my head. Well, what if I do? Those who don't know how to weep with their whole heart don't know how to laugh either.

It is not often that idealism of student days finds adequate opportunity for expression in the later life of manhood.

The Sabbath is not for the sake of the weekdays; the weekdays are for the sake of Sabbath. It is not an interlude but the climax of living.

The reaction of the public plays a very important role. It gives us an adrenaline boost, especially when people start to shout and clap their hands in time with the music. That really helps us to go on.

There were hard days but I never felt sorry for myself.

One simply cannot pay tribute to Stephen Covey without saying at the outset that he was a lovely human being.

We have a Scottish Parliament and National Assembly for Wales, both elected by fairer votes - involving proportional representation.

Im a bowling pin even when I fall Ill always stand back up.

Let us not paralyze our capacity for good by brooding of man's capacity for evil.

No nation has friends only interests.

'Politico Magazine' listed me among the top 50 'thinkers, doers and visionaries transforming American politics' for my work in coalitions advancing net neutrality.

In Montana, where Sen. William Andrews Clark made his fortune and lost his reputation, people had assumed that all his children were long dead. After all, he was born in 1839 and was of age to serve in the Civil War.

I cannot believe how much I love my kid. It's a beautiful thing.

Money is misunderstood. The fact is if you want to be successful - the money will follow you. If you are a doctor, something else will follow you. If you are successful, there is an accompaniment. If your goal is just to make money, you won't succeed. Money is a commodity to use, not to be dictated by.

The typical response from people when I tell them I'm diabetic is, 'Oh, I'm sorry to hear that.' You know, I'm not. I'm a better athlete because of diabetes rather than despite it. I'm more aware of my training, my fitness and more aware of nutrition. I'm more proactive about my health.

Detachment is what interests me, seeing how people couldn't have been any other way, how they were the product of forces that they had no control over.

Don't postpone joy until you have learned all of your lessons. Joy is your lesson.