“[On his success] It’s mad and bananas and amazing, but I can handle it for the simple reason that it genuinely feels like it’s not real. You know when you go to a fancy dress party and everyone looks incredible and there are crazy things hanging from the ceiling? For about five hours or so, you enter into another world and then, when you come out of it, you are sitting at home with a cup of tea and a biscuit and you’re thinking to yourself, “Well, that was weird. Fun, but weird.” That’s exactly what it feels like… Truly, everything that has happened to me has been beyond any reasonable expectations that I may have had.”

“The dream is to keep surprising yourself, never mind the audience.”

“Every villian is a hero in his own mind.”

“Actors in any capacity, artists of any stripe, are inspired by their curiosity, by their desire to explore all quarters of life, in light and in dark, and reflect what they find in their work. Artists instinctively want to reflect humanity, their own and each other’s, in all its intermittent virtue and vitality, frailty and fallibility.”

“I try not to make plans. God always laughs at your plans. I’m going to keep the door open, and keep the page blank, and see what gets painted upon it.”

“Loki’d!”

“I am an optimist… I choose to be. There is a lot of darkness in our world, there is a lot of pain and you can choose to see that or you can choose to see the joy. If you try to respond positively to the world, you will spend your time better.”

“I gave myself permission to care, because there are a lot of people in this world who are afraid of caring, who are afraid of showing they care because it’s uncool. It’s uncool to have passion. It’s so much easier to lose when you’ve shown everyone how much you don’t care if you win or lose. It’s much harder to lose when you show that you care, but you’ll never win unless you also stand to lose. I’ve said it before. Don’t be afraid of your passion, give it free reign, and be honest and work hard and it will all turn out just fine.”

“Love your life. Because your life is what you have to give.”

“Never stop. Never stop fighting. Never stop dreaming.”

“Never, ever, let anyone tell you what you can and can’t do. Prove the cynics wrong. Pity them for they have no imagination. The sky’s the limit. Your sky. Your limit. Now. Let’s dance.”

“Never stop. Never stop fighting. Never stop dreaming. And don’t be afraid of wearing your heart on your sleeve – in declaring the films that you love, the films that you want to make, the life that you’ve had, and the lives you can help reflect in cinema. For myself, for a long time… maybe I felt inauthentic or something, I felt like my voice wasn’t worth hearing, and I think everyone’s voice is worth hearing. So if you’ve got something to say, say it from the rooftops.”

“Stay hungry, stay young, stay foolish, stay curious, and above all, stay humble because just when you think you got all the answers, is the moment when some bitter twist of fate in the universe will remind you that you very much don’t.”

“We all have two lives. The second one starts when we realize that we only have one.”

“You never know what’s around the corner. It could be everything. Or it could be nothing. You keep putting one foot in front of the other, and then one day you look back and you’ve climbed a mountain.”