Alan Rickman

I always feel that when I come to Edinburgh, in many ways I am coming home.

It would be wonderful to think that the future is unknown and sort of surprising.

Unless we tell stories about ourselves, which is all that theater is, we're in deep trouble.

I mean, language fascinates me anyway, and different words have different energies and you can change the whole drive of a sentence.

Each character I play has different dimensions. I'm not interested in words that pull them together.

I have a photograph at home of Fred Astaire from the knees down with his feet crossed. It's kind of inspiring because it reminds me his feet were bleeding at the end of rehearsals. Yet when you watch him, all you see is freedom. It's a reminder of what the job is about in general, not just being in musicals.

I was 7, and I remember being given a part in a play and thinking, This is exciting.

Film has to be reflecting the world that we live in, and that's all you want to be a part of. Actors inhabit the same planet as everyone else. It's a weird thing that happens when you're an actor because people hold you up because you somehow embody in parts groups of people or people's hopes or something.

I think every English actor is nervous of a Newcastle accent.

Actors are actually very supportive of each other.

Parts win prizes, not actors.

Who I am gets in the way of people looking innocently at the parts I play.