Writing and creating, those things come to me on their own. I feel like... you sort of summon them and it's like allowing the universe to enter your heart in an entirely different way to what it normally does. It's like inviting that energy of the universe to enter into your craft in a way where it has a meaning.

I can sing the saddest song with a bunch of people, and the feeling of sharing that energy activates in a way that either heals it or makes me feel like I've risen a thousand miles above it into space, and I'm staring down on it as a little dot.

I see this beautiful and tragic world, and I do my best to describe it, because it's been crushing to me since I was a kid. It seems to be how I connect.

For me, the best thing you can do as a man in loving someone is to do your best, go on that walk, and at the end of that walk be as much of a gentleman as you were in the beginning.

As an actor, I can just show up and do my job. The success and failure of the film depends on team work.

At the time I retired I was kind of known for it, as one of the guys whose career ended technically as a result of a big hit.

I have my way of dealing with lows in my career: I just go on a holiday. Coping with a failure of a film is like coping with a break-up. It's sad and heart-breaking, and it's not like I got over it right after my holiday; it took me some time.

I'd been a housewife and mother to our son Thomas Jefferson, and I was looking for a new career. So when my agent called and said a producer named Paul Elliott from E&B productions, the biggest panto company in the country at the time, wanted to meet me I agreed.