Spying is a like a game of chess: Sometimes you have to withdraw, sometimes you have to sacrifice one of your pieces to win - preferably a knight rather than a king or queen.

There is a demographic catastrophe happening in Europe that nobody wants to talk about, that we daren't bring up because we are so cagey about not offending people racially.

In the film world, we can all be heroes. In the real world, where heroism can cost you your life or the life of the ones you love, people aren't so willing to make those sacrifices. When they do, they are set apart from the rest of us.

The universe starts off with the Big Bang theory, and the first thing that emerged from the Big Bang is essentially hydrogen and then helium. And that's what combusts in stars. Finally, stars implode, and they build heavier elements out of that. And those heavier elements are reconstituted in the heart of other stars, eventually.

Actors endow the villain in fiction with a warmth and quality that makes them memorable. I think we like fictional villains because they're the Mr. Hyde of our own dreams. I've met a few real villains in my time, and they weren't the least bit sympathetic.

We live in a modest system, a galaxy called the Milky Way. If we named every star in the Milky Way and put them in the Hollywood telephone directory and stacked those telephone directories up, we'd have a pile of telephone directories 70 miles high.

I think I have more stamps in my passport than most stamp collectors have in their collections.

Many do not understand how precarious Western civilization is and what a joy it is. From it, we get real democracy. From it, we get the sort of intellectual tolerance that allows me to propound something that may be completely alien to you.

'Indiana Jones' wasn't physically tough, but they are the only two films I've ever been ill on. On 'The Last Crusade,' I got sciatica. That's when the sciatic nerve, which goes through the funny hole in your pelvis down your leg, swells and rubs against the nerves.

I found it marvelous that the great supporters of America in Europe are, of course, those countries that American consistency and firmness in the Cold War ended up liberating.

I am a believer in the evolutionary process, and yet I have sympathy for the friends of mine who are creationists. I don't find the positions incompatible.


Peter Jackson and Steven Spielberg are men at the top of their game, and Jackson especially is going to change the nature of film-making.

I was offered the opportunity to narrate the Catholic bible, and it was something I really wanted to be involved with.

People have become disillusioned with Parliament, and that threatens democracy.

When I looked further into my mother's history, I realised that her anxieties and her neuroses could be accounted for by facts from a very early age. Her parents, William Henry Jones and Sarah Emily, were desperately poor.