“Acting's boring.”

“As long as the cheques carry on coming in, and I'm enjoying my work, I shall continue acting.”

“Bosses will tell you they are looking for something different but they're not, actually.”

“Every actor has to love and loathe the character he plays.”

“I come from the liberal side of thinking: Better one guilty man should walk free than one innocent man found guilty.”

“I don't believe in the death penalty, but I understand personal vengeance.”

“I don't do social media.”

“I don't remember my first two marriages... the details are very sketchy.”

“I had a bit of a male menopause. It started at the age of 18 and continued until I was 45.”

“I mean, I'm an actor. I do what comes along.”

“I never wanted a life of having a nice house, driving around, settling down.”

“If I'd had the choice when I was 14, and someone had said to me, 'You can either be a footballer or an actor,' I'd have said: 'Well, can't I be a footballing actor?'”

“I'm a child of the Sixties.”

“'Lovejoy' has a special place in my heart because it was through my efforts that the series first came to the screen.”

“My dad was a football player - a soccer player - for Manchester United, and I loved playing football, but I also happened to be the guy in class who was pretty good at sight reading. My teacher gave me scripts, and I was very comfortable.”

“My daughter said, 'I don't think granddad really suits you.'”

“My second marriage was to a girl I met in Manchester, kept a long-distance relationship going for two years, then we got married... disaster.”

“Robert Fisk is my hero. In America, they think he's a terrorist.”

“Seventy years old! How did that happen? I was part of the generation that wasn't going to die.”

“The bad boy: always more fun.”

“The bad boys get all the best lines.”

“Theater is a dance of a different kind, a dance of rawness and characters stripped down.”

“What you do is, you just do the gig, enjoy, get on with it, and treat the rest as horse doodle.”

“What's great about acting is you can let all your wackiness hang out while you work.”

“When you're in your early 20s, you go ahead and do everything. And it's very hard to judge yourself.”

“You don't particularly want to stay close to your ex-wife. Or why would she be your ex-wife?”