I'm obsessive about the kind of melodrama of getting through the days and trying to make them good and funny and a happy experience. But my feeling towards the fans is that they delivered me from darkness.

Actors are able to trick themselves into treating anything as if it's fantastic. It's a kind of madness really.

We have newsreaders behaving like actors, lowering their voices if it's a sad story, as if we didn't know it's a sad story. There isn't a single cool newsreader.

I think quite often a fate worse than death is life - for lots of people.

Most drama in our lives is really rather squalid.

I'm obsessive about the kind of melodrama of getting through the days and trying to make them good and funny and a happy experience. But my feeling towards the fans is that they delivered me from darkness.

Politicians are just Daily Mail journalists writ large, aren't they? They're always telling us what's going to happen, and we know they don't know!

I never examined what I did in any great detail because I thought it would spoil things. I never read the scripts at all carefully, and never wanted to know what was going on, because I felt that being a benevolent alien that's the way it should be.

Not only don't I know who I am, but I'm very suspicious of people who do know who they are. I am sometimes ten or twelve people a day, and sometimes four or five people an hour!

I have never described the time I was in Doctor Who as anything except a kind of ecstatic success, but all the rest has been rather a muddle and a disappointment. Compared to Doctor Who, it has been an outrageous failure really - it's so boring.

I am a one success man.

I don't watch television. I know better than that.

I have no regrets about being 'Doctor Who'. It was the greatest thing that ever happened to me.

I really think that reading a whole script is kind of prying and neurotic, don't you?

I think people can believe in anything.

I think quite often a fate worse than death is life, for lots of people.

I used to always be putting my hat on children being photographed and then getting home and discovering I was riddled with lice. That used to happen very, very regularly. I used to get headlice all the time.

I was never really happy until I became 'Doctor Who'.

I wasn't interested in novelty. I was looking for good drama.

I've been involved in one or two successes in classical plays but nothing to touch the excitement and the glamour and the gratification of being a children's hero for so long.

It's funny, in literature no one ever goes to the lavatory.

Lis Sladen was very important to me, you know. When I joined the little world of 'Doctor Who', Lis was already a star.

My capacity as a monk was to passionately believe utter nonsense, and when you're an actor you have to do the same thing. Also, Christianity used to have a lot to do with self-loathing and an acceptance of criticism and things like that which is terribly important for actors.

One longs to be funny, to make people laugh. Laughter is such a sign of approval, isn't it?

The Old Testament is my favourite science fantasy reading.

The thing is I'm very interested in bad taste, as anyone who's ever seen me perform or had dinner with me would know.

We are pre-disposed for fantasy, there is a natural impulse for human beings to want to get off their heads or out of their heads in something in a substance or a drink or an idea or a religion which will comfort them and make life exciting.

Well, I think people don't recognise my face because I'm so much older now, but it is astonishing that people can recognise a voice. I do sometimes get recognised, and indeed a lot of people do come and see me.

Actors are able to trick themselves into treating anything as if it's fantastic. It's a kind of madness really.

Some Christmas tree ornaments do more than glitter and glow they represent a gift of love given a long time ago.

Respect is more than giving consideration of ones feelings. It is showing common courtesy for another human being.

Loving friends let kindness grow in their hearts, creating a oneness with their souls.

A great tribute, is expressing the great love for a Grandmother we share with our children.

Strange - is it not? That of the myriads who Before us passed the door of Darkness through, Not one returns to tell us of the road Which to discover we must travel too.

A work will only have deep resonance if the kind of darkness I can generate is something that is resident in me already.

Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn, whatever state I may be in, therein to be content.

This is an area you always need to address when you're dealing with Dracula is the fact that there is something kind of attractive in his darkness - which there isn't in other horror characters.

Sometimes it is better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness.

Science has explained nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.

But I notice that there is a lack of darkness in my movies and I don't know where that comes from.

I think seeing Pryor's first movie, Live In Concert, when I was in high school changed my life. Pryor really put the heart in darkness for me.

In Sleep we lie all naked and alone, in Sleep we are united at the heart of night and darkness, and we are strange and beautiful asleep; for we are dying the darkness and we know no death.

I really believe that all of us have a lot of darkness in our souls. Anger, rage, fear, sadness. I don't think that's only reserved for people who have horrible upbringings. I think it really exists and is part of the human condition. I think in the course of your life you figure out ways to deal with that.

And suddenly, like light in darkness, the real truth broke in upon me; the simple fact of Man, which I had forgotten, which had lain deep buried and out of sight; the idea of community, of unity.

Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.

The three great problems of this century; the degradation of man in the proletariat, the subjection of women through hunger, the atrophy of the child by darkness.

I say there is no darkness but ignorance.

I wondered vaguely if this was when it would end, whether I would pull up tonight's darkness like a quilt and be dead and at peace evermore.

This book, conceived in sorrow, composed in grief, and constructed at the brink of despair, contains my mind's best thoughts, and my soul's triumph over the powers of darkness.