I'm not actually sure that actors or artists should be allowed to have a family, because the focus you need, the egotism, the myopia, is just taking away from the relationship.
— John Rhys-Davies
Actors endow the villain in fiction with a warmth and quality that makes them memorable. I think we like fictional villains because they're the Mr. Hyde of our own dreams. I've met a few real villains in my time, and they weren't the least bit sympathetic.
I hate being out of work!
If I had a bloody tattoo for every film I'd done, I'd be a walking billboard.
I have a lot of respect for aspects of Islam, but I would not choose to live in a theocratically organised Muslim society.
There is a demographic catastrophe happening in Europe that nobody wants to talk about, that we daren't bring up because we are so cagey about not offending people racially.
Given the fact that I have a family and responsibilities, it's the mark of a man to find the courage to do what is right in the face of oppressive evil.
People have become disillusioned with Parliament, and that threatens democracy.
Faith is not a rational thing, and yet to understand the universe, rationality alone will not give it to us. Our understanding of the universe must transcend the rational.
I can't give a soundbite for love or money.
Basically, theater or film is a dangerous industrial environment.
As I come towards the end of my life, you get to see things in a slightly different perspective.
Films are fun, but life is much richer.
If you cannot have fun on a set and enjoy what you're doing, you're better off giving 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.
Intellectually, now, I believe that it is a complete vanity to say positively there is no God.
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.
Unkindness is quite a major sin.
With a bad script and even the best cast, the most you can hope for is to turn a sow's ear into a silk purse.
'Indiana Jones' wasn't physically tough, but they are the only two films I've ever been ill on. On 'The Last Crusade,' I got sciatica. That's when the sciatic nerve, which goes through the funny hole in your pelvis down your leg, swells and rubs against the nerves.
'Shogun' was a mini-series, so even though it went on television, we filmed it like a movie.
I do not want to see a society where, should I ever have any, my granddaughters have their fingernails pulled out because they are wearing nail varnish.
I was offered the opportunity to narrate the Catholic bible, and it was something I really wanted to be involved with.
I've always been attracted to films which explore the qualities of courage.
I think your children are your measure of success, regardless of work and career.
When you get back to fundamental questions - 'Why should anything exist?' A, I'm not sure what the answer is in terms of the science, and B, I'm not sure that science can even ask that question.
I am a believer in the evolutionary process, and yet I have sympathy for the friends of mine who are creationists. I don't find the positions incompatible.
Once you've got a child to the point that they've discovered books, they're safe. There's a world of the imagination that when they're hurt or upset, they can move into, and it is wonderful.
When I looked further into my mother's history, I realised that her anxieties and her neuroses could be accounted for by facts from a very early age. Her parents, William Henry Jones and Sarah Emily, were desperately poor.
I love a good safari.
I found it marvelous that the great supporters of America in Europe are, of course, those countries that American consistency and firmness in the Cold War ended up liberating.
Actors are always looking for actor-proof parts. A part so good you can't screw it up!
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.
How stupid do you have to be to imagine that you can turn 'The Lord Of The Rings' into a film script?
When you've opened your heart to a child as you have to, there's always the fear that you may discover that the child is not viable. Losing that child is not a position you want to find yourself in.
The most despised sector of Hollywood are the writers. A good writer is quickly promoted to a 'concept man' - and then a producer - because he's too valuable to simply be a writer.
I'm a little smarter than most.
If you've gotta follow a fashion, pick a good fashion, I say, yes.
Western Europeans are not having any babies.
Peter Jackson and Steven Spielberg are men at the top of their game, and Jackson especially is going to change the nature of film-making.
No one should be allowed to stand for Parliament without proof that he has taken responsibility for other people.
To experience the unique sense of elation that you have when your child is sleeping on your chest in an incomparable emotion.
I count myself a a rationalist and a skeptic with a very conscious awareness of my indebtedness to Western Christian civilization, and I am a fairly passionate defender of it.
I used to fly airplanes myself, so being above the ground doesn't worry me too much.
My parents were always Welsh-speaking and very proud of Wales.
When you think about a walking tree, laughter is the response.
A solitary child growing up in Africa, you're really quite dependent on books.
I think I have more stamps in my passport than most stamp collectors have in their collections.
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.
Just think about it: in every shop in the reading world since 1956, there has been two feet of book-space devoted to Tolkien.
