If I were mayor, I’d invite everyone to have free boat trips on the river and free balloon rides over the city. I’d let the elderly in residential homes wander free.

He painted me when I was young because he was in love with me, but now that he has loved me he doesn’t paint me anymore.

I love Dickens because it makes me chuckle to myself so. He has taken me to another world and out of so many earthly miseries.

Any film I see at two o’clock in afternoon with my mother seems to cast a strange spell that means we both come out sobbing.

I don’t know why people keep banging on about the ’60s. I came from a conventional family and I didn’t go off with different people – I rather wish I had now, seeing all the fun everyone else was having.

I know what it’s like to have someone coming home who looks at you not in the way they used to in the old days, and I’ve seen my own face contorted with sadness and rage in the mirror.

I’d rather live on my own than live with a face that looks at me with the wrong eyes.

If I were mayor, I’d invite everyone to have free boat trips on the river and free balloon rides over the city. I’d let the elderly in residential homes wander free.

People always like things that seem exotic.

When I was at school I used to scream in trains, in those concertina things between the carriages. I used to try to be so good that sometimes I couldn’t bear it any more.

I grind my teeth and keep my thumbs in so tight that I’ve dislocated them, just not to scream. Sometimes as an actor one is lucky enough to be asked to scream.

Robert Louis Stevenson… I’m focusing on the late short stories that I was ignorant of. I always thought he was a boys’ author, but he’s not at all.

If you fall in love with a country and its people, that makes any country warm to you.

I only like boutiques.

Keep smiling – it takes 10 years off!

My mother was right: When you’ve got nothing left, all you can do is get into silk underwear and start reading Proust.