Richard E. Grant

I always panic on the first day of work. You can do all the Stanislavsky-backstory homework, but when that moment arrives and you are in the clothes, hair, and makeup of somebody else, and you're saying the words created by somebody else - I never know how to do it. It's a complete mystery to me.

It always depresses me when people moan about how commercial Christmas is. I love everything about it. The tradition of having this great big feast, slap bang in the middle of winter, is an essential thing to look forward to at the end of the year.

The fashion world is much more ephemeral than the film industry and moves at a faster pace, and it's got even more frenetic since the Nineties; more paparazzi hanging about and it seems to me there are even more fashion magazines.

You feel your game's raised by working with the best people.

I watch TV all the time. Everything.

Lena Dunham is an extraordinary woman.

I wrestle every opportunity with gusto.

The ease and pleasure of a long marriage is like gold dust. You feel fed and sustained and that you're intimately known.

Every time I try to plan something or assume that something's going to happen, it never works out like that.

I went to a school called Waterford Kamhlaba, and 'Kamhlaba' is what the king of Swaziland called the school because... in siSwati, it means 'all the world in one.'

I've been an actor for so long, and a moviegoer ever since I can remember, because the country that I grew up in didn't have television.

Because I grew up in Africa, I always see people and try to understand characters as what kind of animal they'd be.

I would love to play your common, everyday guy, but I never get cast as that.

I've kept a diary since I was 11. It's a way of taking stock, almost meditative, trying to make sense of stuff because life is chaotic.

I've been on the 'Logan' movie set, which is a 300-strong crew of basically men. They had arms thicker than my thighs stuck together.

My father was an alcoholic. I come from a family of them, so it's genetic luck or malfunction that I've ended up with no enzyme that processes it. I literally can't drink.

You have to have some connection, empathy, or chemistry with the person you're playing and playing with.

Even 31 sounds quite old to me, because my brain is probably still in a state of adolescent delinquency.

The Christmas tree goes up on December 1. I love it.

My parents were divorced when I was 11, and it made such a profound impression on my life that I suppose I thought that by not getting married, you could avoid your life being carved in two.

Nothing is fixed or foolproof; I have no delusion about that.

I was brought up to appreciate the here and now, and, knowing this is your only life, to view death as an inevitable and reassuring end.

Smell is the shortest synaptic leap in the brain to our memory, and I'm amazed that people don't sniff everything.

I've been led by my nose all my life and tried to make perfume by boiling sugar water in jam jars and stuffing them full of gardenia and rose petals when I was growing up in Swaziland.

My father died prematurely at the age of 52 when I was 24, and it is a recurring regret that he never lived to see me succeed beyond university and drama.