Phrases

-We owe it to our children to be better stewards of the environment. The alternative? – a world without whales. It’s too terrible to imagine.

-When people don’t believe in you, you have to believe in yourself.

-Love is a lot like dancing; you just surrender to the music.

-Maybe sometimes the best things are worth waiting for possibly.

-You can get totally messed up trying to please everyone with what you do, but ultimately, you have to please yourself.

-Love means that everything is right with the world. Love and only love. Love means that you are content within your own heart and in the presence of the person that you love, who fills your day and makes you stronger and wiser, and gives you the confidence to go out into the world. Love is just the most beautiful, joyous feeling.

-Regret, is usually a waste of time. As is gloating

-To my eye, women get sexier around 35. They know a thing or two, and knowledge is always alluring.

-Education isn’t a result. It’s a process.

-I had to make a living. I had the mortgage to pay, I had the school fees to pay. I had bread and butter to put on the table.
-You know your worth as an actor, but you have to get a job.

-I’m Irish, for gods sake. I’m a romantic.

-Acting allows me to explore new worlds, to discover characters by delving into their lives, and ultimately to become someone else entirely.

-The like factor is a great thing. Love cannot burn constantly. It’s very hard for it to be so intense. But it’s wonderful.

-Love is just the most beautiful, joyous feeling. It can come from many places.

-As the Trump presidency goes on, there will be a transcendency of power and culture and vision from the music scene, the art world that will find a voice and give hope to us all.

-Oh, humiliation is poisonous. Its one of the deepest pains of being human.

-I believe you can only draw from your own life as an actor. All the characters I’ve played, I only have my infinite eye and the presence of my life to take from.

-I love movies, don’t get me wrong. But I don’t go to the cinema. I see movies at the end of the year as a glut from the Academy. I binge-watch all the nominated films. Painting fills that void now. It’s oils. It’s acrylics. It’s figurative, portraits and landscape.

-Everybody gave 100%. I mean everyone, because they all knew that the film had the bones and the heartbeat of something that could be good. And everyone was in on it and wanted it for me and wanted it for Roger and Beau.

-That’s it. I’ve said all I’ve got to say on the world of James Bond.

-Being with my wife and children in Kauai, seeing old friends there, being on the beach, painting, paddleboarding. Sitting under a Kauai moon with a bonfire going, buddies around. Those are the things that kind of make my world turn.

-I think you make the best with what you’ve got, you know? Sometimes you have very little. And you just always try to rise to higher ground, because you’re going to suffer one way or the other, so you just hope that you have strength and perseverance and good friends and faith, some kind of faith, to endure and move on to greener pastures.

-Childhood was fairly solitary. I grew up in a very small town called Navan in County Meath. I never knew my father. He left when I was an infant and I was left in the care of my mother and my grandparents.

-I found myself in the changed man theory the other night thinking, “Yeah.” I thought, “My god. If we could do this again,” but there was nothing specific there. There’s just the kind of vague sensation

-You have to move forward. It’s constantly changing. Everything changes and everything falls apart. You have to be nimble and on your toes and accessible to it all. Not everyone is on board with this.

-Everyone can make a real difference. Your voice is needed in a global movement that can change their world

-There’s too many people in seats of power who just haven’t got a clue what they’re doing. They’re bean counters, and it just pisses me off because consequently our kids go to see this crap movie.

-I had big dreams when I was a boy. And I can’t say that I never saw a beach house in Malibu in those dreams.

-Being here by the ocean in Malibu. Living in this beautiful house that we built, that took so long to build. Being in my art studio, painting. Packing my bags tomorrow to go home to Kauai where we have a house. Which all sounds very grand, and I suppose it is, in some respects, but nothing comes from nothing. It all comes from hard work.

-America, which leads the world in so many ways, can end childhood hunger within its borders.

-I had to have some balls to be Irish Catholic in South London. Most of that time I spent fighting.

-When your partner gets cancer, then life changes. Your timetable and reference for your normal routines and the way you view life, all this changes. Because you’re dealing with death. You’re dealing with the possibility of death and dying.

-My mother was the prettiest woman in the town. He was a bit older than her. They made me. And he split.

-Liam in Taken has been great to see. My boys love it. They love him. And there’s just the gravitas to it. It’s believable. You know the guy’s endured. You know the guy’s lived some life. Someone like Liam has lived a lot of life. Myself, I’ve lived a lot of life. There’s loss. There’s success. There’s loss. There’s doubts. And there’s some heartbeat there.

-Love means that everything is right with the world. Love and only love.

-I love these kind of movies as a kind of cinema-going geek myself. Those characters, you want to be like those characters when you go to the movies. You know, when you see a movie with a guy who’s really cool and the killing’s slick and easy. I don’t know. There’s something intoxicating about it.

-Together we are stronger, our voices louder, and the synergy of our actions more powerful. Together we can prevail on the Navy to put commonsense safeguards in place, like requiring its ships to avoid the most sensitive marine mammal habitats and to stop their training exercises during peak migrations.

-I’ll make phone calls. I’ll call anybody and knock on any door to try and get a location, or get an actor, or get an actress. But no, it was just very easy. We just hit the ground running.

-I love movies. I adore movies. I grew up on Steve McQueen and Clint Eastwood and Warren Beatty. The list goes on. Spencer Tracy. I wanted to be in movies.

-I certainly got the jokes within the joke, dressing up in a wet suit, sitting in a Twingo, scaling a rubber mountain, dressing up and stealing a diamond, of course. If not now, when?

-From ’86 until the summer of last year, wherever I went, people would say, You would have made a great James Bond! Weren’t you going to be James Bond? You should have been, you could have been, you may have been. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. It was like unfinished business in my life. I couldn’t say no to it this time around.

-America gave me the great glory of coming into people’s homes every week and allowed me to last as long as I have.

-Some people have a tendency to get knocked down in this business and sulk and whine, and they just create a rod for their back, really. You have to have broad shoulders and get through it.

-The art helps, between the acting gigs. I feel that if I can sing in Mamma Mia! then goddammit, I can hang a few paintings, give people lots of cocktails, and have a good time.

-Many people think that hunger is unavoidable in any society, even a society that is blessed with great abundance. That is not true. The European community does not have widespread hunger. America, which leads the world in so many ways, can end childhood hunger within its borders.

-It felt after the Bonds, after my four outings as James Bond, there seemed to be unfinished business. And the way that the Bond finished in my life and the demise of Bond going off stage left into the night, it seemed like there was a certain void there, as they say, of unfinished business.

-Sometimes you take time off, and then you look around and you go, “Hello. What happened? Oh dear!”

-I don’t see myself as the ‘Hunk of the Month’.

-The violence and sexuality on TV today is exhilarating. You can explore every aspect of society. People’s sexual orientations, the violence that goes within that… there are no holds barred.

-I’m not very comfortable with watching my performances. I don’t particularly find a great joy in it. Everything is the process of making it, of getting it, getting the job, saying yes to the job. Those are the joys. Making it is the greatest joy. And then, you have to show the bloody thing. You have to show and tell, be judged. But I don’t listen. I don’t pay much attention. I hear the rumblings of greatness or the arrows of discontent and harsh words. Then you go, “Oh God. Why?”

-The Bond was so big and mighty in my career, and it is the gift that just keeps giving. I wouldn’t be here today talking about “The November Man” if it hadn’t been for James Bond. So, there was a desire, a want, and a need to make this film, “The November Man.” I loved the title. It has a sensuality and a mystique to it.

-I was a commercial artist when I left school, but luckily I became an actor. I’ve painted for many, many years. Now the last few years it’s gotten more serious.

-We want the world to focus on children whose lives have been devastated by AIDS. The millions of children who are missing their parents; their childhood, their future but most importantly, they are missing YOU. Everyone can make a real difference. Your voice is needed in a global movement that can change their world.

-This man called President Bush has a lot to answer for. I don’t know if this man is really taking care of America. This government has been shameful.

-When I found acting, it was my saving grace – still is. That I get paid to do it is remarkable. That I get to meet people like Salma Hayek – one of the most beautiful women I know, with the most magnificent energy – is phenomenal.

-I paint in oils, I paint in acrylics. I paint figurative and landscape portraits. It’s all in my own kind of style. I’m self-taught.

-You need to love everyone.

-I live a very simple existence when I’m not on the road. Because when I’m on the road making a movie, I’m away from home.

-I lost track of it thereafter. I wish I had a piece of it. That would have been very, very nice. It was one of those little things they get you on the Bond and then suddenly your face is every which way.

-And consequently, you have this rich looking film, which gives it this kind of muscular feel, deep focus, soft focus look. I’m not that great on development. I can see where things go wrong, but Beau, Carl and Mike Finch, they worked on it relentlessly. And then I would see the material and I would say, “Well, that just doesn’t ring true. I don’t quite know why that’s happening.”

-I didn’t think that and I didn’t verbalize that to myself or within meetings that we ever had, but we wanted to make a hard-nosed, gritty, realistic spy thriller. Roger talked about using lenses. He shot hi-def, but using anamorphic lenses that he’d found from this warehouse. He was so thrilled with that. Him and Romain [Lacourbas] were just like kids in a toy store with their lenses.

-The White Palace was pretty impressive. Very impressive, in fact. The day to day running of the set was everybody showed up for work. They are seasoned filmmakers over there. They have an infrastructure for filmmaking, which is very healthy. It’s small, but they were tenacious, polite, timely.

-So that would be my input and I’d go off and I’d work on another film, and then I’d catch up with them later on in the year. We just kind of nursed the piece along. There was no timeframe. We didn’t have anyone pushing us except ourselves to make the film, and a desire. And then the organic kind of naming of Roger; then it happened really fast.

-I’m an actor first and foremost. My producing credentials are just to say, “Yeah, I love this story and now let’s bring the people, the ensemble together,” and I get out of the way. I have no desire to check on schedules and shooting schedules and money and stuff like that.

-There’s no question about it. Beaumarie St. Claire and I, we created Irish DreamTime after GoldenEye hit. We made movies like Thomas Crown and The Matador. And in between my stints as James Bond, I’d go off and I’d do something like The Matador or Tailor of Panama, which was spy related, just so I could shake it up. It’s a genre which really appeals to me.

-It never felt real to me. I never felt I had complete ownership over Bond. Because you’d have these stupid one-liners – which I loathed – and I always felt phony doing them.

-People should be allowed to marry, and gay marriage should be out there. If a man or a woman has a good partner and they love each other with their heart and soul, let them marry. I am very much for gay marriage.

-Dark comedy is very difficult. You have to bring the audience in and push them away at the same time.

-It will be very hard to get out of Bond. It will be the pictures I do between Bonds that will color my career, that will give my career longevity after this franchise is over … I will be stamped with this character for life.

-I should like to think that we’ll find peace on this Earth at some point and come to a collective consciousness of COMPASSION for each other, where we say, ‘Enough! Let us live as one!’