TIMOTHY SPALL

It doesn't bother me one iota that most of my career has been playing people who are not that - well, let's say that people wouldn't aspire to be like them.

I know what I like when I see it, but no way have I ever become interested in learning about it.

I'm working class, and want people to know I'm not unintelligent and all the other cliches that come with it.

I was always insecure about the way I looked.

Imagination is a beast that has to be put in a cage.

It's an odd world.

I know I work quite hard at making people like me.

When I was at school when I was 16, I was in a quandary because I didn't know whether I wanted to join the army - I had this terrible desire to be a tank driver in the Royal Tank Regiment, genuinely - or whether I wanted to go to art college because half of me wanted to be in the army, and the other half of me wanted to be a surrealist.

You invent this massive lagoon of information without any pressure to do anything apart from create this person, a person that might fit the bill that is the character that is emerging from the research.

If one wants to measure oneself by the facile accruement of awards, then I've done very well.

If I can't get hold of someone I love, I'll assume they're being tied to a radiator by al-Qaeda rather than their battery's run out. I'm quite a worrier.

It's my job to manipulate feelings.

There's two types of character actors. There's character actors who play all different characters. Or there's actors who always play the same part; they're just a bit funny-looking.

I'm sick of having an opinion on everything. Getting older, you learn all sorts of things you're supposed to, but I feel like it's time, when you get older, through experience, to... I started to feel quite... what's the word? ... intimidated by seeing both sides of everything.

My wife... now travels with me everywhere - not because she nearly lost me, but because my kids are all grown up and my son is now a very successful actor, Rafe Spall.

Because I can think rationally, I can think cosmically, and I can think about the world scientifically and poetically and the universe.

I believe that a world that doesn't have some kind of magic in it wouldn't be worth living in.

Life is a massive amount of feelings with the occasional profound engagement with intellect. As I get older, I hope the intellect takes over.

There's nothing like a little bit of unemployment to kick the stuffing out of you when things are going well.

In 1996, when I was being treated for leukaemia, at one point I had a vicious infection that was trying to claim me. Mercifully, due to love and expertise, I pulled through.

My job as a character actor is to make me fit the character, to serve the character. To present this human being who turns up in a piece of film or entertainment that's going, you know, exist as if it might exist after the film is finished and it existed before the film has started.

I played Othello at RADA - blacked up. I didn't know it was going to be offensive now!

You're immortal, aren't you, until you get a little peek over the precipice. The thought of death...You're not supposed to start pondering it until you're old. And there's nothing like being told you've got a life-threatening disease to concentrate your mind on that.

When you're doing a film, your agent and manager spend hours - days - talking about contractual obligations. If you turn up for work and ask for a peeled grape on top of foie gras but you don't get it, you can't get annoyed.

I don't play the lottery, as I feel I have been really lucky in what I have been able to do in my life, but if I did win, it would be the usual things - helping out the people I love. I'd probably squander a few quid on all sorts of unnecessary crap!