Christmas to a child is the first terrible proof that to travel hopefully is better than to arrive.

But if one could go back in time, I’d love to have been directed by Howard Hawks, who’s one of my great heroes. One of the greatest directors there ever was. He directed probably one of the greatest westerns of all time in Rio Bravo.

Having been an actor and a writer for so long – 20 years or so – I felt that it would be daft to go to one’s grave without having directed. It’s a natural extension of writing and acting, and so I knew it would happen one day.

But happiness is no respecter of persons.

I am a lover of truth, a worshipper of freedom, a celebrant at the altar of language and purity and tolerance.

I’d probably want to teach at university, because children would drive me insane. I suspect it would be English literature, Shakespeare and so forth. I’ve always been deeply, deeply in love with that kind of thing.

Many people would no more think of entering journalism than the sewage business – which at least does us all some good.

When you’ve seen a nude infant doing a backward somersault you know why clothing exists.

Taste every fruit of every tree in the garden at least once. It is an insult to creation not to experience it fully. Temperance is wickedness.

Old Professors never die, they just lose their faculties.

Personally, I’d never seen a graphic novel. I knew they existed because friends of mine like Jonathan Ross collect them and some very literate and intelligent people really rate the graphic novel as a form.

I get an urge, like a pregnant elephant, to go away and give birth to a book.

I have pushed the boat out as far as I should in terms of taking on too many things. I’m getting older and I just could not take it any more. I am now monitoring myself very closely and I’m just trying not to get into that sort of state again.

I don’t need you to remind me of my age. I have a bladder to do that for me.

Moving from chair to chair, from coffee machine to coffee machine is the limit of my action in most films. But I enjoy being cast in them because I love watching them.

I think my view is that whenever you project into the future you’re never likely to be accurate in the details, or the paraphernalia and style.

It was extremely important to show that Wilde’s sexuality was not just some intellectual idea. It was real, and it was about the human body. To just have mentioned it and not shown it would have been, I think, peculiar and wrong.

It is a cliche that most cliches are true, but then like most cliches, that cliche is untrue.

You don’t sit down and write a wish list about the person you are going to fall violently in love with. It just doesn’t work like that.

I think the fact that I’m so well known to be gay makes it very difficult to have a convincing relationship with a woman on screen. It wouldn’t be at all difficult for me to kiss a woman – I’ll kiss a frog if you like.

Having a great intellect is no path to being happy.

That one can love another of the same gender, that is what the homophobe really cannot stand.

I like to think of myself at home in the armchair, writing, smoking and occasionally wandering down the shop.

When you get just a complete sense of blackness or void ahead of you, that somehow the future looks an impossible place to be, and the direction you are going seems to have no purpose, there is this word despair which is a very awful thing to feel.

I don’t watch television, I think it destroys the art of talking about oneself.

It’s rather splendid to think of all those great men and women who appear to have presented symptoms that allow us to describe them as bipolar. Whether it’s Hemingway, Van Gogh… Robert Schumann has been mentioned… Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath… some of them with rather grim ends.

Love in all eight tones and all five semitones of the word’s full octave.

No, I love the idea that someone changes. As an actor it’s always the thing that you look for. He is someone who starts off bright, cheerful and confident and then has everything taken away from him. It’s a wonderful journey to take.

There is so much we can learn from TV. It’s a window on the world.

Oh, it takes a lot for me to walk out of a film.

As someone who worked hard for a Labour victory in the 90s, do I regret it? Not really. It was bound to happen. And it’ll happen with the next government, and the one after it. Because all governments serve us. They serve the filth.

I think we have all experienced passion that is not in any sense reasonable.

You can’t reason yourself back into cheerfulness any more than you can reason yourself into an extra six inches in height.

An original idea. That can’t be too hard. The library must be full of them.

It only takes a room of Americans for the English and Australians to realise how much we have in common.

I shouldn’t be saying this – high treason, really – but I sometimes wonder if Americans aren’t fooled by our accent into detecting brilliance that may not really be there.

They are just 100 per cent bear, whereas human beings feel we’re not 100 per cent human, that we’re always letting ourselves down. We’re constantly striving towards something, to some fulfilment.

I’ve always had great respect for Paddington because he is amusingly English and eccentric. He is a great British institution and my generation grew up with the books and then Michael Horden’s animations.

Christmas to a child is the first terrible proof that to travel hopefully is better than to arrive.