I can't be compared to Pele. I need to do so much more to be compared to Pele. Pele is fantastic. And he's unique.
The most important thing to me is to give something back to my parents, because they've done so much for me throughout my life.
I just like being on my own on trains, traveling. I spent all my pocket money travelling the London Underground and Southern Railway, what used to be the Western region, and in Europe as much as I could afford it. My parents used to think I was going places, but I wasn't, I was just travelling the trains.
And as much as I love the gritty characters, I like to play all sorts of characters. I'm an actor. I love to create.
I'm in the camp that needs to discover and take risks, sometimes it's with the promise of something special and new, sometimes it's to stay awake, either way it's much more stressful with all the uncertainty but worth the pain in the end.
I've always enjoyed searching for clothes. I like thrift stores and vintage stuff, and not so much going to Urban Outfitters. What got me interested is having to choose dresses for the carpet, and doing a lot of shoots with really cool clothes. I've gotten to try on a lot of things that I've liked, and some things that I haven't.
My diet is always extremely important to me. I've taken a new approach to eating in terms of my blood type. I really don't eat much chicken, sugar, salts, or beef. Just eating clean and feeling so much better.
I don't much believe in bumper sticker characterizations of foreign policy.
The history of the past, a hundred years from now, won't be the history of the past that we learned in school because much more will have been revealed, and adjectives we can't even imagine will have been brought to bear on what we did learn in school.
Part of the way the work world works is not so much creating a separation between your work and your free time, but creating the illusion of a separation between your work and your free time. Every day is the weekend for me, which means I'm always busy.
Having spent all that time getting away from South Africa, running away from the army, I wanted very much to believe that America and England were actually as free as they were meant to be, not slipping rapidly into becoming police states like the one I'd just left.
Fluid intelligence doesn't look much like the capacity to memorise and recite facts, the skills that people have traditionally associated with brainpower.
Sartre said that wars were acts and that, with literature, you could produce changes in history. Now, I don't think literature doesn't produce changes, but I think the social and political effect of literature is much less controllable than I thought.
I get as much sleep as possible. When I get home, I have just enough energy to lay out my clothes and go to bed.
Whenever I sing 'Total Eclipse of the Heart,' the way people sing along with me still excites me. It's one of the songs that audiences know all the lyrics to, and they sing along with me, and it makes me so happy. People also know my songs 'Holding out for a Hero' and 'Lost in France,' and this gives me so much joy on stage.
In the forefront of science, there is not much difference between religion and science. People harbor beliefs. That's what happens when people believe something religiously.
Thirty was a big deal for me. It was the age where I reevaluated everything - how I approached life and how I thought about myself. When I look at my 20s, or when I look at any period in my life, I think about how much time I've wasted trying to find the right man.
You put as much effort as you can when they're young into trying to teach them to be good people or make them the best they can be, and they're older now, my kids. I'm at that stage where I let them go, and you just hope that all that nurturing you did earlier on sticks, and you launched good people out there.
Bond in 'Goldeneye' is pretty much a set character. To be honest, he's another version of Connery, and Connery was terrific. How many submarines can you blow up? How many control rooms are evaporating?
I enjoy the hunt much more than the 'good life' after the victory.
Most historians don't much like generalizations. Indeed, they make a trade of showing that this or that generalization about the past will not work here or there or then.
That's still the greatest high, that feeling of being in control of 2,000 people. It's me and them, and I like the odds. It's not even so much the funny. It's getting them quiet. In the quiet moments in '700 Sundays,' I just really love that they're getting moved.
The end of times has always been a fascination. But post 9/11, pretty much everybody will admit to having it on their minds more frequently than when they were a kid.
You need to rebel to see the other options and to get a much richer, fuller sense of the world. And it's only once you've worked through that and seen through that that you can come back and accept who you are. You have to try all the other options.
Some of the most vulnerable people to getting the SARS virus are health care providers. The general public, walking in the street, there is really not that much risk at all. It's a very, very low risk - a very, very low risk.
Without really trying to, I've become a sort of jailhouse lawyer of relationships - someone who's had to do so much work on her own case that I can now help you with yours.
I don't hide anything about myself, so I don't find it difficult to talk about things that happen in my life... But at the same time, I don't like putting myself out there too much. That's how I am.
There's only so much you can say about celebrity, obviously.
I was so dedicated to generating income to keep my family housed and clothed and schooled. That mattered to me. And playing good golf mattered to me. The rest of the things, like how my record stacked up against others, never made that much difference.
Corn is already the most subsidized crop in America, raking in a total of $51 billion in federal handouts between 1995 and 2005 - twice as much as wheat subsidies and four times as much as soybeans. Ethanol itself is propped up by hefty subsidies, including a fifty-one-cent-per-gallon tax allowance for refiners.
One of the most obvious parts of my character is the smile, and if I wasn't comfortable in myself then I wouldn't be able to smile so much.
I enjoy worldbuilding very much. I generally start with an approximation. With 'Flesh and Spirit' and 'Breath and Bone,' because I was thinking of a world on the brink of a dark age, I began with the sense of Roman Britain. But I purposely set the geography to match something other than Britain - which has been overdone.
In elections in Iceland, I have always been an abstainer. It seems like politics is such a small bundle of self-important people, who don't have much to do with things I'm interested in.
I think - in general, I don't think I've been involved in a single movie that turned out the way I anticipated it to turn out. Just because, as an actor, there's only so much that I can bring to a project.
Challenges of historic import threaten America's future. Action on the deficit, economy, energy, health care and much more is imperative, yet our legislative institutions fail to act. Congress must be reformed.
I'm always up for music shows such as Jools Holland, but news more than anything, particularly Newsnight. And cookery: Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Rick Stein - it's down to him that I cook fish so much - and the great food alchemist Heston Blumenthal.