When I was a kid, I wrote to the BBC, and the producers sent me a huge package through the post with 'Doctor Who' scripts. I'd never even seen a script and couldn't believe that they actually wrote this stuff down. It sort of opened a door.

Peter Capaldi

Drawing is the only thing I've found in which I can lose myself completely. I love it. It started as something that relaxed me, but now it's a struggle because I'm pushing myself. The day-to-day sketching is fraught.

Peter Capaldi

Love Art Wing

Real heroes are all around us and uncelebrated.

Peter Capaldi

Us UN Ted

A girl once came to my beery flat in Kensal Green, opened the blinds and cooked me breakfast. I married her.

Peter Capaldi

T Pen Opened

I could never plan to have a career that went this well... you know, there were times when it didn't: when it went into the toilet, or ducked, or was difficult to get moving.

Peter Capaldi

Time Car You

My family know not to get me any tech for Christmas. I can never get it to work, and it all becomes very tearful and pressurised.

Peter Capaldi

Work Family Christmas

I think the periods of being unsuccessful have made me a better actor.

Peter Capaldi

Success Unsuccessful UN

I don't like parties. There was never a party I was at where I didn't wish I was somewhere else.

Peter Capaldi

Art Wish Where

The biggest thing I have realized was that you have to choose your collaborators very carefully, and that not everybody can like you. The process of filmmaking is so difficult, there's no point in doing it unless you can do it the way you want.

Peter Capaldi

Car Your You Can Do It

'Doctor Who' belongs to all of us. Everybody makes 'Doctor Who.'

Peter Capaldi

Who Very Us

Being asked to play 'The Doctor' is an amazing privilege. Like the Doctor himself I find myself in a state of utter terror and delight. I can't wait to get started.

Peter Capaldi

Art Amazing Wait

My Italian granny and my mother made great spaghetti, but it wasn't a kind of southern Italian, Godfather-esque kind of thing - it was a wonderful, big mixing pot of all kinds of people - when you came home from school and your mum wasn't in, there were lots of people you could go to.

Peter Capaldi

Home Great God

A little showbiz never hurt anyone.

Peter Capaldi

T Showbiz Show

When I was acting, I was always asking abut the mechanics of filmmaking. I decided I would learn what everyone on set was doing, so I would feel less threatened.

Peter Capaldi

Would Ways Way

Shouting at people keeps you alive, healthy, young, fresh.

Peter Capaldi

Health Young You

In Peter Ackroyd's book 'London: The Biography,' he describes the route of the medieval wall that enclosed the original city. Take the book and follow it from the Tower of London via the Barbican to Ludgate Hill. You experience the real history of London.

Peter Capaldi

Pet History Experience

The Americans just have a great sort of wit about them.

Peter Capaldi

Great Wit Us

When I was a kid, I wrote to the BBC, and the producers sent me a huge package through the post with 'Doctor Who' scripts. I'd never even seen a script and couldn't believe that they actually wrote this stuff down. It sort of opened a door.

Peter Capaldi

Age Wrote Wit

There is no such thing as too much swearing. Swearing is just a piece of linguistic mechanics. The words in-between are the clever ones.

Peter Capaldi

Words Word Wearing

I failed the audition to get into drama school.

Peter Capaldi

T School Ram

I destroyed all my geek stuff because I didn't want to be a geek, and I regret it to this day. Consumed in the geek bonfire of the vanities was a collection of autographs and letters from Peter Cushing, Spike Milligan and Frankie Howerd, the first Doctor Whos, actual astronauts, and many more.

Peter Capaldi

Pet Who Want

We don't consider the Wizard of Oz or Father Christmas to be too old. They're still magical characters, and the fact they've been around the block only adds to their magic.

Peter Capaldi

A year after winning the Oscar, almost to the day, I was directing a dog food commercial.

Peter Capaldi

I was always admiring people who seemed to conduct themselves with ease in the world. Maybe that's a great gift to give your kids if you can do that. Because they can move through the world without neurosis, this anxiety about everything, which our own parents gave us.

Peter Capaldi

What's now shocking is I can't say anything publicly without it having a life. Not because I have extraordinary views but because people are keen on conflict, so they'll make that the story.

Peter Capaldi

I don't remember 'Doctor Who' not being part of my life, and it became a part of growing up, along with The Beatles, National Health spectacles, and fog. And it runs deep. It's in my DNA.

Peter Capaldi

It seems to me that most things that are being made are designed for young people. There aren't that many depictions of melancholic older people, even though they form a growing proportion of the population.

Peter Capaldi

At 17 years old, STG took me under its wing and shared its resources and wisdom with me, even allowing me to take part in a show at the Edinburgh Festival. Without STG and the Ramshorn Theatre, I would not have found access to the world of drama that I later made my profession.

Peter Capaldi

If I had gone to drama school, I wouldn't be sitting here now because it would have blanded me out; it would have just turned me into another actor.

Peter Capaldi

I'm fascinated by fire. When I was four, I wore an American fireman's hat all the time, and I still have one in my office today. Glasgow used to be called 'Tinderbox City;' there were always fires, people getting killed.

Peter Capaldi

I haven't played Doctor Who since I was 9 on the playground.

Peter Capaldi

The only time I've tried to make plans, the cosmic sledgehammer has intervened and something else has happened. You just have to wait and see what comes your way, so that's what I do.

Peter Capaldi

Every viewer who ever turned on 'Doctor Who' has taken him into his heart. He belongs to all of us.

Peter Capaldi

I like the constant rise and fall of the British film industry. But above all, I like the workhorses who kept going no matter what.

Peter Capaldi

I've lost count of the times I've been asked to 'be' Malcolm Tucker: to go on a political program on television, presumably in order to be the character and give opinions as him.

Peter Capaldi

I'm not an extravagant man. The fact that I can have a coffee out whenever I want still makes me feel grateful.

Peter Capaldi

I didn't want to be Doctor Who in a 'Doctor Who' that I didn't like.

Peter Capaldi

The British film industry has always tried to sell itself as something rather sophisticated. It's almost as if it thinks it is by royal command. It has always tried to claim the high ground, not only over Hollywood but over the whole of humanity!

Peter Capaldi

The best advice is to get on with it. I'm very prone to falling into depressions - not clinical, just 'can't be bothered.' It's such a waste of time.

Peter Capaldi

I hate the Internet. It's full of rubbish. I'm on it all the time, watching terrible, useless things and ossifying my brain.

Peter Capaldi

I love people where, at the end of the day, they'll pick up a paintbrush and paint clouds. They can physically make things.

Peter Capaldi

I never really think of acting and directing as being separate; they are just different expressions of the same thing.

Peter Capaldi

Believe it or not, one teacher used to call me a giant spastic for not being able to play football.

Peter Capaldi

'Atlantic City' is very good.

Peter Capaldi

If people enjoy my profile from the privacy of their own home, that's entirely up to you.

Peter Capaldi

I hated improvisation because in my early days as an actor, improvisation meant somebody had just come down from Oxford and they were doing a play above a pub in Kentish Town, and the biggest ego would win.

Peter Capaldi

I was initially rather charmed by David Cameron, but I think he's revealing himself to be a slightly darker and less charismatic figure than he first appeared. There's a brutality about him.

Peter Capaldi

Personally, I have as little to do with politicians as possible. The ones that I've met I've found very boring. They're extremely egotistical, incredibly self-important. If I can help it, I try to stay as far away from them as possible.

Peter Capaldi

I lived through a golden period where society felt that it was good to help people who didn't have a great deal of money fulfil their potential.

Peter Capaldi

If I was to meet my eight-year-old self, I would say, 'Don't listen to what they say about you. Wear your anorak with pride!'

Peter Capaldi

I could make the title of my memoirs: 'It's got cinematic disaster written all over it.'

Peter Capaldi