I have respect for what other people believe. What I believe in my own life is that it's a search for how I can do things better whether it's being a better man or a better father or finding ways for myself to improve.

As a younger actor you want to be approved of you want to gain respect be admired. All of those things. To say: 'This is me playing this character. And aren't I fantastic!' I don't feel that so much now.

There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it but you can't prove that there aren't any so shouldn't we be agnostic with respect to fairies?

We are more thoroughly an enlightened people with respect to our political interests than perhaps any other under heaven. Every man among us reads and is so easy in his circumstances as to have leisure for conversations of improvement and for acquiring information.

The little religion that I have clung to-that what matters most is the continuity of life and its improvement from one generation to another.

Compassion is not a popular virtue. Very often when I talk to religious people and mention how important it is that compassion is the key that it's the sine-qua-non of religion people look kind of balked and stubborn sometimes as much to say what's the point of having religion if you can't disapprove of other people?

Liberalism is a religion. Its tenets cannot be proved its capacity for waste and destruction demonstrated. But it affords a feeling of spiritual rectitude at little or no cost.

Even if it were proven that God didn't exist Religion would still be Saintly and Divine.

All religion seems to need to prove that it's the only truth. And that's where it turns demonic. Because that's when you get religious wars and persecutions and burning heretics at the stake.

I met Roy's father once... And I think that Roy's relationship with his father is still at the heart of what Roy does. But at the end of the day he's trying to prove himself to a father he'll never really please.