James Purefoy quotes:

To be brutally honest, I am a little bit of a Clint Eastwood nerd. Clint Eastwood who was the man who drew me into movies. When everybody else was watching Star Wars, I was watching Fistful of Dollars.

Ancient Rome was a violent place.

Hospitals are very extreme places - you can be in a maternity room one minute, and by someone's bedside as they're dying the next.

One of the things I like about doing historical films is drawing the line between now and then.

I think the James Bond thing has sailed. But of course I would want to be a Bond villain. They are great parts. I think it's highly unlikely, but one can always dream.

I do live a weirdly divided life, because I'm not a Hollywood superstar, I don't live on Malibu Beach, I don't do massive 'OK!' spreads, I don't go to premieres and parties that much.

Airport security is a particular bugbear. At the risk of sounding like a grumpy old man, while I can see that averting terrorism is manifestly important, the measures taken seem, simultaneously, absurd.

I love all things Apple and have done since 1996.

Violence is a very ugly thing. Violence is often so casual on film, and made to look so cool and so sexy, but violence is a repulsive, repugnant act that human beings inflict on each other. It shouldn't seem to be cool and sexy, ever really.

If you find yourself always playing the villain, or if you find yourself being typecast into a corner where you're not happy then that's probably rather miserable, but if I have been typecast I am quite happy about it.

Acting gives me a chance to be people I will never be, in real life. I like changing who I am.

We start off wearing frilly shirts and britches and being good guys and the heroes. And then as time goes on, every English actor ends up playing bad guys. That's what we do.

Ring tones are just irritating, aren't they?

I really do want to just be able to sit in the corner of the pub with my friends... to just be an actor and still go to the supermarket and not get bothered.

British actors are pretty good, by and large, at turning on at 'action' and off at 'cut.'

My life is really precious. I don't want to spend it watching ambient TV that just drifts through you. I've got better things to do.

Somebody doing something effortlessly is a lovely thing to watch.

If you look around us, there are an awful lot of men out there, and women, but mostly men, who believe that they have got a fast-track path to Heaven, if they do the things that they believe God is telling them to do, and I don't just mean Islamic people. I mean Fundamentalist Christians.

I'm not a big fan of patterns. I like the unexpected.

I think the business affairs people at the studios get some kind of perverse satisfaction in finding the worst hotels for actors to stay in.

If you look around us, there are an awful lot of men out there, and women, but mostly men, who believe that they have got a fast-track path to Heaven, if they do the things that they believe God is telling them to do, and I dont just mean Islamic people. I mean Fundamentalist Christians.

As an actor you have to get used to receiving gentle little pies in the face.

You know, people aren't watching a network: they're watching cable channels.

One of the great things about being an actor is that you have a completely different challenge every few months.

It has taken a long time for me to be able to really just be in front of the camera.

When you're dealing with killing people and things that are upsetting, that can be a delicate place to occupy yourself for a day.

Im not a big fan of patterns. I like the unexpected.

I think the older I get, the less I should be doing.

One of the things that makes this so topical right now is that I think there are an awful lot of American men - and women, but I'm a man, so that's what I can talk about - who feel the American dream has let them down.

I like doing things that are very wildly different. I find that the meat and vegetables of being an actor is doing things that are completely different, all the time.

I think I come from a theatrical tradition where, if you look at the great theatrical actors of the British theatre, they took enormous pride in being wildly different from one role to the next. That's the tradition I come from.

What I went into the acting business for was to have a certain amount of chaos in my life. I don't know what I'm doing next. It's exciting. That's the way I like it.

I couldn't do the same job for 30 years. That would make me want to kill myself. Other people do it and they're very happy doing it, but for me, that's not what I want. I like changing things, all the time.

One of the reasons a lot of actors go into the business is that for a short period of time, you get to be other people who you can only fantasize about being, by and large.

If you're playing Hitler, you don't play Hitler as an asshole. Hitler believed what he was doing was right. Any of those monsters and any serial killer believes in what they're doing. I play it subjectively.

I'd never read a piece of television where it's an hour script and it's perfect.

Actors are their own worst enemies. They quite often will get in their own way, and I have to be encouraged, endlessly, not to get in my own way.

You need to be disciplined and you need to try to occupy a zone of acting that is always quite scary because you don't think you're doing anything.

If you're going to lead people, you better know how to manipulate people, and you have to be pretty smart to be able to do that.

I often think that drama helps people feel less lonely about things.

One of the great things about drama is that it makes you feel like you're not a crackpot, and that there are other people who think and feel the way you do.

One of the things that I discovered in my research is that some serial killers build an ultimate reality around themselves that they believe in, 100%.

I like television that grabs you by your throat.

Actors tend to get better with age. You start cutting away the useless stuff and achieving a point of effortlessness and simplicity, which is all you want to do, with any art at all.