Because I can think rationally, I can think cosmically, and I can think about the world scientifically and poetically and the universe.
Timothy Spall
You're immortal, aren't you, until you get a little peek over the precipice. The thought of death...You're not supposed to start pondering it until you're old. And there's nothing like being told you've got a life-threatening disease to concentrate your mind on that.
My job as a character actor is to make me fit the character, to serve the character. To present this human being who turns up in a piece of film or entertainment that's going, you know, exist as if it might exist after the film is finished and it existed before the film has started.
In 1996, when I was being treated for leukaemia, at one point I had a vicious infection that was trying to claim me. Mercifully, due to love and expertise, I pulled through.
I believe that a world that doesn't have some kind of magic in it wouldn't be worth living in.
You create a proto-human being out of people that you've encountered in your life, and you start building up this person and start becoming this person.
I'm working class, and want people to know I'm not unintelligent and all the other cliches that come with it.
Eccentricity is usually owned by middle-class and upper-class people. If you are working class and eccentric, then you're just mad.
I don't enjoy the theatre. I don't go. Don't like going in the back door or the front.
If one wants to measure oneself by the facile accruement of awards, then I've done very well.
I think anything that increases your understanding of the human condition... I think age and life, if you're lucky, makes you think deeper, and the other thing it makes you realize is that you never stop learning, and you never lose your fear of getting it wrong.
I think people's imaginations are being neutered by the amount of access they can get to information just by pressing a button.
I played Othello at RADA - blacked up. I didn't know it was going to be offensive now!
You invent this massive lagoon of information without any pressure to do anything apart from create this person, a person that might fit the bill that is the character that is emerging from the research.
I didn't know whether to join the army or go to art college.
I don't play the lottery, as I feel I have been really lucky in what I have been able to do in my life, but if I did win, it would be the usual things - helping out the people I love. I'd probably squander a few quid on all sorts of unnecessary crap!
When you're doing a film, your agent and manager spend hours - days - talking about contractual obligations. If you turn up for work and ask for a peeled grape on top of foie gras but you don't get it, you can't get annoyed.
My wife... now travels with me everywhere - not because she nearly lost me, but because my kids are all grown up and my son is now a very successful actor, Rafe Spall.
As you get older and more thoughtful, you carry stuff with you. Your kids get older, you take on their sorrows, you enjoy their triumphs. Life doesn't always go to plan.
It doesn't bother me one iota that most of my career has been playing people who are not that - well, let's say that people wouldn't aspire to be like them.
When I was born, my dad was a scaffolder, and my mum worked in a chip shop. Then my mum taught herself how to be a hairdresser and ended up with her own salon; my dad became a postman and then a counter clerk. Our first house didn't have a bathroom.
What character actors want to do is investigate new types of people and present them in all their idiosyncrasies, psychological complexities, and contradictory stupidities. That has been one of the great delights over our seven collaborations.
Imagination is a beast that has to be put in a cage.
I know I work quite hard at making people like me.
I know what I like when I see it, but no way have I ever become interested in learning about it.
I was always insecure about the way I looked.
It's an odd world.
I'm sick of having an opinion on everything. Getting older, you learn all sorts of things you're supposed to, but I feel like it's time, when you get older, through experience, to... I started to feel quite... what's the word? ... intimidated by seeing both sides of everything.
There's two types of character actors. There's character actors who play all different characters. Or there's actors who always play the same part; they're just a bit funny-looking.
There's posh character actors. For God's sake, Olivier was one of the greatest character actors in the world. Hamlet, Shylock, Othello - Othello! Whether you like it or not.
If you are afflicted with an artistic feeling, it's just perfecting something.
I love a cinema with two people in it. Love it! Absolutely love it!
The older I get, the more I feel that's all we are: a big bunch of feelings and instincts all wrapped up in some brief encounter with intellect.
You never know what is going to happen to you in life.
I do believe in the power of love.
I feel a bit uncomfortable talking about awards.
Time itself is talked about as something that is unusual, that there could be a parallel time.
You're trying to form this human being that will fit the bill, and the human being becomes a hand, and the research is a glove, and you try to bring this character together into the research, mesh it, and create this person that is the sum total of all that endeavor.
There's nothing like a little bit of unemployment to kick the stuffing out of you when things are going well.
When I was at school when I was 16, I was in a quandary because I didn't know whether I wanted to join the army - I had this terrible desire to be a tank driver in the Royal Tank Regiment, genuinely - or whether I wanted to go to art college because half of me wanted to be in the army, and the other half of me wanted to be a surrealist.
These people I play are not usually wish-fulfillment characters.
It's my job to manipulate feelings.
Life is a massive amount of feelings with the occasional profound engagement with intellect. As I get older, I hope the intellect takes over.
If I can't get hold of someone I love, I'll assume they're being tied to a radiator by al-Qaeda rather than their battery's run out. I'm quite a worrier.
I've never seen a poltergeist, but I do believe there is more than what we see, that there is more than just this.
