I'm equally guilty of using technology - I Twitter I text people I chat. But I think there's something strangely insidious about it that it makes us think we're closer when in fact we're not seeing each other we're not connecting.

The telephone is a 100-year-old technology. It's time for a change. Charging for phone calls is something you did last century.

Once I accomplish one thing and I'm satisfied I try something else. I may be 50 and doing something totally outside of music and acting. Maybe I'll become a kindergarten teacher.

When my opera Plump Jack was performed in 1989 my first piano teacher sent me something that I'd composed when I was four. I remember I played it and it still sounded like me. I'm the same composer I was then.

I first decided to become an actor at school. A teacher gave us a play to do and that had a major impact. At first I wanted to work in the theatre but there was something about the ambience of film especially American films that always attracted me.

I had a teacher in art school who said something about the only works he really enjoyed seeing or found much in were works where he had a sense that a discovery was made in the course of making this object. I like to hold to that as my marching orders.

I was very studious too much. I would never go out at weekends. I was very serious. You should have seen me in class - I was blushing and sweating every time the teacher asked me something.

I went to a Catholic high school and it seemed like every time I drew something for a class project it either got thrown away by the teacher or something.

In my teens I developed a passionate idolatry for a teacher of English literature. I wanted to do something that he would approve of more so I thought I should be some sort of a scholar.

I think my parents were happy that I'd gone to university and gotten a degree in history so they thought 'Well if acting doesn't work for him he can always become a history teacher or something.' Fortunately the acting worked out.