If you take the contempt some Americans have for yuppies and multiply it by 10 you might come close to understanding their attitude towards the City, as they call it - London, the people of the south.

I've got a book of poetry by the bed, one of these big collections that goes back to the Greeks and Romans.

Then years back, when I moved to California, I happened to see a book about fashions of 19th-century Victorian England, only four pages of which was devoted to the dress of the working class.

What's wonderful is to read the different translations - some done in 1600 and some in 1900 - of the same passage. It's fascinating to watch the same tale repeated in such a different way by two different centuries.

You can only do three things with your money. You can spend it. You can invest it. Or you can give it away. And if you invest it, you're really just getting more money to give away or buy something. How many things can you buy? So I don't really think there's a lot of choices.

I've been looking around, and I noticed something: how much you really need to be loved. Ambition isn't just a desperate quest for positions or money. It's just love - lots of love.

There's such a thing, if you're a finance man, as hitting the figures you need to hit. But there's no equivalent in acting. It's a creative field. It's subjective. That's what I love about it.

The structural changes of globalization and automation that has created concentrated wealth among some people who have had the right skills and the right opportunities has also created extraordinary disruption and havoc among the American middle-class.