I've never thought of myself as a professional. I very rarely do something I don't enjoy.

I've worked with Lars von Trier on many films, and there's always a female character that's like an open wound - everything just pours out of this person.

All male roles are written in a way where you just hide what's going on inside you, and all female roles are written in a way where they expose everything.

I started acting as an amateur when I was a kid, but I wanted to become a diplomat. It was self-centered and weird, but I had this idea of going out in the world and solving conflicts and making the world a better place. But I kept on acting, and eventually, I just dropped out of school and continued acting.

I always think of my father when I sing arias about loss and love and longing. It gave me that definite deep sorrow that one can only get from life experience, you know?

Because I spent many years during my previous life as an academic researching game theory, some commentators rushed to presume that as Greece's new finance minister, I was busily devising bluffs, stratagems and outside options, struggling to improve upon a weak hand. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Liberalism regards life as an adventure in which we must take risks in new situation, in which there is no guarantee that the new will always be the good or the true, in which progress is a precarious achievement rather than inevitability.

Every author believes that the book which he is placing before the public will 'fill a long-felt want,' and success or failure depends very much on how closely he has been able to gauge the nature of the 'long-felt want.'