I certainly hope I'm not still answering child-star questions by the time I reach menopause.

It took me less than half a lifetime to realize that regret is one of the few guaranteed certainties. Sooner or later everything is touched by it despite our naive and senseless hope that just this time we will be spared its cold hand on our heart.

Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out.

Isn't it the moment of most profound doubt that gives birth to new certainties? Perhaps hopelessness is the very soil that nourishes human hope perhaps one could never find sense in life without first experiencing its absurdity.

Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out.

Uncertainty is the refuge of hope.

I love being on stage if I'm not on a set. If I'm at home I'm usually in my office editing or reconstructing my website or whatever it may be. I just love putting creativity into a performance so if the right script comes along and I certainly am reading comedies and dramas now then I'm ready willing and able to give it a shot.

I try and eat really healthy when I'm home but I certainly don't eat worms and snakes.

If you're a misanthrope you stay at home. There are certain writers who really don't like other people. I'm not like that I don't think.

Most of us in the baby-boom generation were raised by full-time mothers. Even as recently as 14 years ago 6 out of 10 mothers with babies were staying at home. Today that is totally reversed. Does that mean we love our children less than our mothers loved us? No but it certainly causes a lot of guilt trips.

You come to work and you laugh all day you go home and you feel light and there's a certain feeling when you're sitting with the audience and they leave after 90 minutes and it's just pure escapism and they're happy.

Drama can feel like therapy whereas comedy feels like there's been a pressure and a weight lifted off of you. You come to work and you laugh all day you go home and you feel light and there's a certain feeling when you're sitting with the audience and they leave after 90 minutes and it's just pure escapism and they're happy.

I like to maintain a certain sense of fantasy in my life. I am kind of like that at home. Do I have the full hair and makeup? No. But I might have the nice dress on.

England is my home. London is my home. New York feels like if I have to spend a year living in an unfamiliar city this is a pretty lovely one to spend a year in but I will be going home at the end of it certainly.

The only justification for repressive institutions is material and cultural deficit. But such institutions at certain stages of history perpetuate and produce such a deficit and even threaten human survival.

I just think it would be unrealistic to suggest we're going to eliminate every last domestic insurgent in Afghanistan. Certainly the history of the country would indicate that's not a very realistic objective and I think we have to have realistic objectives.

The best history is but like the art of Rembrandt it casts a vivid light on certain selected causes on those which were best and greatest it leaves all the rest in shadow and unseen.

From Jefferson to Jackson to Lincoln to FDR to Reagan every great president inspires enormous affection and enormous hostility. We'll all be much saner I think if we remember that history is full of surprises and things that seemed absolutely certain one day are often unimaginable the next.

When you think of how history is revealed we know certain things to be facts at certain periods of time which turn out not to be so factual as time marches on.

Those who invoke history will certainly be heard by history. And they will have to accept its verdict.

But every historical statement and legitimization itself moves within a certain relation to history.

One of the enduring problems with certain societies in the world - and this is certainly true of a lot of places in the Middle East - is that the capacity for self-governance and self-organizing just isn't there. It has to do with history.

I am what time circumstance history have made of me certainly but I am also much more than that. So are we all.

It is in the admission of ignorance and the admission of uncertainty that there is a hope for the continuous motion of human beings in some direction that doesn't get confined permanently blocked as it has so many times before in various periods in the history of man.