Comedy is acting out optimism.
Ah, yes, divorce, from the Latin word meaning to rip out a man’s genitals through his wallet.
[on his acting career] All the new people you meet, it’s pretty amazing. The vampire needs new blood. And there is still a lot to learn and there is always great stuff out there. Even mistakes can be wonderful.
Okra is the closest thing to nylon I’ve ever eaten. It’s like they bred cotton with a green bean. Okra, tastes like snot. The more you cook it, the more it turns into string.
We have a president for whom English is a second language. He’s like ‘We have to get rid of dictators,’ but he’s pretty much one himself.
I believe I could do dance on ice, or play in a musical of Freud’s life called ‘It’s Your Mother’ – or maybe one for the symbolists: ‘Jung at Heart’. There’s always the one about India: ‘The Gandhi Man Can’.
(While accepting the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for Good Will Hunting) Most of all, I want to thank my father, up there, the man who when I said I wanted to be an actor, he said, ‘Wonderful. Just have a back-up profession like welding.’
There’s not much room for eccentricity in Hollywood, and eccentricity is what’s sexy in people.
If you sold out the Troubadour, that was it.
In the morning, I can not be without looking at my phone to see the IM’s or any missed calls that I missed and Food!
[on Anthony Weiner] I remember him now… the man whose name is so perfect for the scandal he was caught up in that it rekindled my faith in God.
Every person has a signature. Just some people don’t know it yet.
I literally change my phone number 10 times a year and I don’t ever save my contacts.
I wanted to be in a band that shared ideas and were in it together.
I used to sleep nude – until the earthquake.
Making a movie requires 20 to 500 people to make and a lot of money and the stakes are a lot higher.
The thing is, we’re not extravagant people. It’s just unbelievable the amounts of money we make. But we don’t spend it. It’s too scary to spend it.
Congratulations, Congress! 77% disapproval rating! You may be about to become the English language’s most offensive C-word.
In reality, the main thing that keeps me awake at night is probably the destruction of the planet; that’s what gets me pretty upset.
Some may call it attitude, some might call it genius
His (Freddie Mercury) words got better quickly. There were some very overt lyrics. Don’t Stop Me Now is a good example. He was having a good time, and that was very much a cri de coeur. Some lyrics we wrote together like I’m Going Slightly Mad, which was funny. We had fun coming up with daft things, all those ridiculous phrases. I’d say it was Freddie’s actual musicality which was the cleverest thing of all, the notes, and his harmonic structure was quite brilliant. When he wrote The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke, on the second album, he was crossing sections of six-part harmonies, and I thought: Bloody hell, that is tricky stuff. Then there’s The March Of The Black Queen, which is almost like prog-rock, and so outrageously complicated that I can’t even remember the arrangement myself. When you write songs that complex, you have to work hard at it, and it did invoke a lot of head-scratching. But then he’d come up with Killer Queen or, later on, lots of simple things like Crazy Little Thing. He had it on all sides. Freddie evolved. I always called him the man who invented himself’. I think the talent was innate, but he dug deep inside himself and forced it out. His determination was quite something.
I found myself a sophisticated, educated American. He’s not an actor. He’s traveled the world. He knows where Europe is, unlike a lot of Americans. He’s very cultured, but he’s all man.
