Alan Rickman quotes:

And it's a human need to be told stories. The more we're governed by idiots and have no control over our destinies, the more we need to tell stories to each other about who we are, why we are, where we come from, and what might be possible.

The more we're governed by idiots and have no control over our destinies, the more we need to tell stories to each other about who we are, why we are, where we come from, and what might be possible. Or, what's impossible? What's a fantasy?

I think there should be laughs in everything. Sometimes, it's a slammed door, a pie in the face or just a recognition of our frailties.

I love perfumes. Every morning when my girlfriend and I come down to the courtyard in our block of flats we're assailed by the most delicious scent - jasmine round a doorway. It almost makes me swoon.

My idea of a real treat is Magic Mountain without standing in line.

Actors are agents of change. A film, a piece of theater, a piece of music, or a book can make a difference. It can change the world.

I have a love-hate relationship with white silk.

Acting touches nerves you have absolutely no control over.

The point about a great story is that it's got a beginning, a middle and end.

If only life could be a little more tender and art a little more robust.

Talent is an accident of genes - and a responsibility.

Nothing gives me as much pleasure as travelling. I love getting on trains and boats and planes.

Older people say, 'Oh I loved you in 'Sense and Sensibility,' and that's the only film they want to talk about. Equally, there are people who only want to talk about 'Galaxy Quest.' And there's a whole bunch of teenagers who only want to talk about 'Dogma.'

Los Angeles is not a town full of airheads. There's a great deal of wonderful energy there.

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 a student in London in the '70s, so CBGB really wasn't on my radar at all. Obviously, I was aware of the emergence of the Police in England and as an art student, I was very aware of David Byrne, but I suppose my musical taste at that time certainly didn't stretch towards the Dead Boys or the Ramones.

I love working in New York theater.

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

I think worrying things are going on in England - a real apathy.

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

I want to swim in both directions at once. Desire success, court failure.

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

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

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

All I want to see from an actor is the intensity and accuracy of their listening.

I think the thing about film is, as it gets proved by a lot of young filmmakers now, that the medium will just go on reinventing itself, and so you just hope to be a part of that and not a part of some kind of endless regurgitation or 'Here I am doing what you know I do' kind of thing.

I'm very aware that when one is acting in the theater, you do become kind of animal about it. And you're reliant on instincts rather than tact a lot of the time.

In theater, you've got to be aware of your whole body because it involves stamina. It involves two-and-a-half hours and a sustained release of energy, maybe for six months.

I'm a quite serious actor who doesn't mind being ridiculously comic.

The first time that I came to New York to work properly was the mid-'80s, but I was doing eight shows a week. You have no life. Going to a punk rock club - or whatever the music was at that time - would not have been on my agenda.

A wounding tongue. I'm working on it. Perhaps its the Celt in me.

I'm still living the life where you get home and open the fridge and there's half a pot of yogurt and a half a can of flat Coca-Cola.

Mellow doesn't describe me. I'm hungry every day.

I have just returned from the dubbing studio where I spoke into a microphone as Severus Snape for absolutely the last time.

On the screen were some flashback shots of Daniel, Emma and Rupert from ten years ago. They were 12. I have also recently returned from New York, and while I was there, I saw Daniel singing and dancing (brilliantly) on Broadway. A lifetime seems to have passed in minutes.

I get stage fright and gremlins in my head saying: 'You're going to forget your lines'.

On film you put all your energies into a single glance.

When I get off the plane in England I always feel about two inches shorter.

I've never been able to plan my life. I just lurch from indecision to indecision.

Maverick is a word which appeals to me more than misfit. Maverick is active, misfit is passive.

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

I suppose with any good writing and interesting characters, you can have that awfully overused word: a journey.

When I'm 80 years old and sitting in my rocking chair, I'll be reading Harry Potter. And my family will say to me, 'After all this time?' And I will say, 'Always.

I do feel more myself in America. I can regress there, and they have roller-coaster parks.

I like it when stories are left open.

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

You know, London is so sprawling, and you can sometimes forget that anybody else is on a stage anywhere else.

I do take my work seriously and the way to do that is not to take yourself too seriously.

If you could build a house on a trampoline, that would suit me fine.

Three children have become adults since a phone call with Jo Rowling, containing one small clue, persuaded me that there was more to Snape than an unchanging costume, and that even though only three of the books were out at that time, she held the entire massive but delicate narrative in the surest of hands.

I think there's some connection between absolute discipline and absolute freedom.

From my experience, I think that every actor has to make sure that they're in charge of their own career somehow or other.

I knew with Snape I was working as a double agent, as it turns out, and a very good one at that.

I am the character you are not supposed to like.

It is an ancient need to be told stories. But the story needs a great storyteller. Thanks for all of it, Jo.

I approach every part I'm asked to do and decide to do from exactly the same angle: who is this person, what does he want, how does he attempt to get it, and what happens to him when he doesn't get it, or if he does?

What is it about actors? God knows I get bored with actors talking about themselves.

There's a voice inside you that tells you what you should do.

One longs for a director with a sense of imagination.

You can lull the paying customers as long as they get slapped.

Market forces impose certain rules before a film can actually get made.

Any actor who judges his character is a fool - for every role you play you've got to absorb that character's motives and justifications.

A lot of the time I hate the theater. You think, 'I have to climb Mount Everest, again, tonight.' Oh, the theater is a scary place to be.

England in the '60s and the '70s was everything that history has said; it was phenomenally exciting, musically.

It's a nightmare to sit and watch a film that I'm in. There's a horrible inescapability to it.

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

I never talk about 'Harry Potter' because I think that would rob children of something that's private to them. I think too many things get explained, so I hate talking about it.

Somebody with Debbie Reynolds' features doesn't get cast as the Wicked Witch.

Being on the stage in New York is always exciting because you feel like you're part of the life of the city.

We're dead as a species if we don't tell stories, because then we don't know who we are.

The difference between being an actor and a director is simple. The director has to hide his panic; the actor doesn't.

I have every sympathy for writers. It's a mystery to me what they do. I can edit. I can cross out and say, 'I'm not saying that' or, 'How about we move this to here? Wouldn't that make that bit of the story better?' But where any of it comes from is beyond me. I will never write a play or a novel.

I can only see my limitations. That's just who I am.

Those of you who are not aware of my brilliant career as a stand up comic, I'm not aware of it either so we might well wonder what we're doing here.

I am hellbent on defying your expectations, at every turn, and even if you don't like what's being done, I dare you to find it uninteresting.

One thing I will say - my job gets harder and harder. The more you understand about what you are capable of, the less the instrument can do it physically. It's an inverse equation, if that's the right phrase. I just slammed those two words together. It sounded right.

Give me a window and I'll stare out it.

With the best intentions, the job of acting can become a display of accumulated bad habits, trapped instincts and blocked energies. Working with the Alexander Technique has given me sightings of another way... Mind and body, work and life together. Real imaginative freedom...

I'm a lot less serious than people think, it's probably because the way my face is put together.

I don't play villains, I play very interesting people

You can act truthfully or you can lie. You can reveal things about yourself or you can hide. Therefore, the audience recognizes something about themselves or they don't -- You hope they don't leave the theatre thinking that was nice...now where's the cab?'

What's interesting about the process of acting is how often you don't know what you're doing.

Originally, theater was my life. It was what I assumed I'd spend my working life doing - if I was lucky. Then along came movies.

Acting is about giving something away, handing yourself over to whatever role you are asked to play. I'm not hiding or escaping or seeking anonymity. I reserve the right not to have a rubber stamp on my forehead saying this is who I am. Because who I am gets in the way of people looking innocently at the parts I play.

So you can't judge the character you're playing ever.

I'm always aware of the camera and it feels like that's the audience.

Acting is mostly about listening. If you just focus in on what the other person is saying, acting takes care of itself to quite a large extent.

One of the most, in a weird way, encouraging things a director can say to an actor - I know this as an actor - is when you ask them a question, they say, I don't know - 'cause it means there's some space there for you to find out. And it means that there's going to be a process.

The directors you trust the most are the ones, when you ask them a question, they've got the guts to say, 'I don't know.'

That's it then. Cancel the kitchen scraps for lepers and orphans, no more merciful beheadings, and call off Christmas.

When I am asked about influences, I always say I bow down to Fred Astaire, because when you look at him dancing you never look at his extremities, do you? You look at his centre. What you never see is the hours of work that went into the routines, you just see the breathtaking spirit and freedom.

I never expected to have any kind of film career, to be honest. It was all a bit of a surprise. But I was in a big hit play on Broadway. America, as many people will say, says yes more often than we do. And so I was suddenly surrounded by people saying yes. But I was aware that was 'cause of what I was in. It had a big impact.

My definition of palatable might be slightly different from yours.

Why don't I like you?" "Because you think I'm an asshole, and I'm not really, I'm just British and, well, you're not.

Every so often you read a play and a character just speaks to you - almost seems to speak through you, in fact.

If you judge the character, you cant play it.

The audience should feel like voyeurs. Their response is absolutely crucial.

I'm a lot less serious than people think.

Certainly as actors, and maybe as directors, you've got to hang on to something childlike. You've got to know what play is. I haven't worked with Mike Leigh, but I know him very well and there's something open in his eyes about what's in front of him. And the same is true of Alfonso in a Mexican, mad way. There's an enthusiastic response to something. Neil Jordan, the same, when he gets excited . You just want to know there's a human being in there.

I've learned, having been on a lot of sets, the good news is that by definition you are surrounded by experts. They get fired if they're not - unlike in the theatre!

My parents certainly didn't have anything to do with the theater. I'm some kind of accident.

There's, like, marks next to an actor's name or something, and boy does that go up and down! Somewhere in there, which always causes my mate Miss Ruby Wax great hilarity, I was offered a biopic of Frank Sinatra. Even I knew that was a bad idea! They'll throw anything at you at certain times. So, you know, to thine own self be true.

Snow Cake is a lovely film. Really proud of that. We shot it in 21 days. I thought Sigourney was amazing in it. And very, very accurate. I think there was some element that thought she had pushed it too far. But not at all when you do the amount of homework she had done and spent the amount of time she did with adult autistics. She was right on the money. And I think Marc Evans is a terrific director. He's a sweet, open, honest man and a really good director of actors.

I was coming from a very cerebral, dark, difficult, layered play by Christopher Hampton and doing an action movie in Hollywood (Die Hard) with explosions, and I was holding a gun.

If you spend any time in Los Angeles, there's only one topic of conversation.

Older people say, 'Oh I loved you in 'Sense and Sensibility,'' and that's the only film they want to talk about. Equally, there are people who only want to talk about 'Galaxy Quest.' And there's a whole bunch of teenagers who only want to talk about 'Dogma.'

Actors are actually very supportive of each other.

I don't think it's right that everybody knows everything about me.

If people want to know who I am, it is all in the work.

Parts win prizes, not actors.

You try to find things that are challenging and interesting and hopefully it will be the same to the audience.

I have this feeling that if I could sort out what's on my dining room table, everything would fall into place.