I can't believe, even in 'The Guardian,' people ask the questions, 'Where did ISIS come from?' 'How did this happen?' 'Why do young Muslim women go off to join them?' Maybe because we've been degrading their people since 1917. Maybe their teenage years are a little bit more stressed than that of Christianity.

Well, my wife always says to me, and I think it's true, it's very difficult for us to understand the Elizabethan understanding and enjoyment and perception of form as it is to say... it would be for them to understand computers or going to the moon or something.

My understanding is that we are generally a very philanthropic and compassionate people - that when there are disasters in the world, individual citizens send loads of money into appeals for different things. We're a bloody violent people, football fans, and we've been successful at wars, and we sell far too many weapons.

I certainly never pictured myself even attending the Academy Awards, much less winning at 56. I very, very happily settled into a theater career. I did more than that, but I let all of my agents and people go. I said, 'I don't want to be promoted in film anymore. I have enough to do in the theater, so I'm just going to carry on.'

Nothing convinces an artist more of the arbitrariness of the means to which he resorts to attain a goal - however permanent it may be - than the creative process itself, the process of composition.

As an actor, our very palette is one of imagination. So it is a walk onto an empty space and then imagine the world beyond it is what we do.

I knew I wanted to be an artist, but I never took music lessons. I was just playing around in front of the mirror and being silly, then suddenly I started making songs.

As much as I love to do commercial films, a touching romantic film like Mani Ratnam's 'Geethanjali' will satiate my creative appetite.