"I'd love to spend more time on the Isle of Man. I love the anonymity of putting on a boiler suit and going down to buy parts for the compressor. And Norman Wisdom's a neighbour; I salute him occasionally."
"I enjoy acting. It's not that I begin to think I'm getting better. I now fully know that I've made no improvement whatsoever since I was 20. I can live with it."
"Villains are a lot of fun. My villains have a lot of tongue-in-cheek. They are sometimes conscious of and a little bit gleeful of their villainy."
"Many do not understand how precarious Western civilization is and what a joy it is. From it, we get real democracy. From it, we get the sort of intellectual tolerance that allows me to propound something that may be completely alien to you."
"Spying is a like a game of chess: Sometimes you have to withdraw, sometimes you have to sacrifice one of your pieces to win - preferably a knight rather than a king or queen."
"The script of 'Shogun' was so tight that you could not take a word out of a sentence, you could not take a sentence out of a scene, and you certainly couldn't take out a scene without putting ripples right through the back or the front of the overall story."
"Sometimes you learn more from films that aren't terribly successful and, indeed, sometimes you learn more from real disasters than you do from the ones that succeed."
"I think 'The Lost World' could've been a successful movie except for the fact that it pre-dated the good special effects and computer graphics."
"Actually, I'm addicted to science fiction. Let me make my diction clear - I love sci-fi."
"Hollywood is a far safer place to work than working abroad, because of the skill level, and because of the safety considerations that experience and unionization have created."
"The word 'career' and 'actor' really don't fit in the same paragraph, let alone sentence. There is no career structure for actors."
"To be an actor for 30-odd years trying to become recognized, and to end up playing a full prosthetic and a character 3 foot 9', or something like that, is... well, it just shows that you can get actors to do anything."
"I like heroes, and would like to be a hero myself. I suppose we all want that."
"In the film world, we can all be heroes. In the real world, where heroism can cost you your life or the life of the ones you love, people aren't so willing to make those sacrifices. When they do, they are set apart from the rest of us."
"It's not hard to get people to take a premise and accept it."
"Sometimes a writer just needs a hook."
"How stupid do you have to be to imagine that you can turn 'The Lord Of The Rings' into a film script?"
"When the writers themselves are a bit out of control, and their lives are collapsing around them, they seem to rejoice in misery and celebrate the wrong sort of things."
"Just think about it: in every shop in the reading world since 1956, there has been two feet of book-space devoted to Tolkien."
"We live in a modest system, a galaxy called the Milky Way. If we named every star in the Milky Way and put them in the Hollywood telephone directory and stacked those telephone directories up, we'd have a pile of telephone directories 70 miles high."
"Intellectually, now, I believe that it is a complete vanity to say positively there is no God."
"The universe starts off with the Big Bang theory, and the first thing that emerged from the Big Bang is essentially hydrogen and then helium. And that's what combusts in stars. Finally, stars implode, and they build heavier elements out of that. And those heavier elements are reconstituted in the heart of other stars, eventually."
"Actors are always looking for actor-proof parts. A part so good you can't screw it up!"
"There's nothing like the discipline of having to work on a cold film set on the Danubian plain in Bulgaria. Boy, does it get cold."
"I think I have more stamps in my passport than most stamp collectors have in their collections."
