James Purefoy

“I am not a big fan of what I call 'ambient television,' which just washes through you in a very polite way. I like television that grabs you by the throat and doesn't let go.”

“I wasn't accepted the first time I tried to get into drama school. I said, 'I'll give this one more shot... and if that doesn't work, I won't bang my head against this painful brick wall.'”

“When I started acting, I used to read all the reviews.”

“I was very unmotivated at school.”

“When you're unhappy, you tend to play up, don't you?”

“I really do want to just be able to sit in the corner of the pub with my friends... to just be an actor and still go to the supermarket and not get bothered.”

“You really need to learn how to turn it on for 'action' and off for 'cut.'”

“Once you have kids, horror movies become too horrible to watch because you imagine your own children in those situations, so you stop watching them.”

“You were always told that if you worked hard, you would get somewhere. But so many people feel they have worked hard and they have nothing to show for it.”

“I grew up in a very rural community in England.”

“When I was growing up, 'Butch and Sundance' was my absolute favorite film.”

“I ran into my old friend Michael Kenneth Williams, who I worked with on a show called 'The Philanthropist' for NBC. He was going to be doing this show called 'Hap and Leonard.' He was playing Leonard, and they were looking for somebody to play Hap.”

“British actors are pretty good, by and large, at turning on at 'action' and off at 'cut.'”

“I think the older I get, the less I should be doing.”

“Ring tones are just irritating, aren't they?”

“Decide very early on: do you want to be an actor or do you want to be famous? Because they're very different routes.”

“If you look around us, there are an awful lot of men out there, and women, but mostly men, who believe that they have got a fast-track path to Heaven, if they do the things that they believe God is telling them to do, and I don't just mean Islamic people. I mean Fundamentalist Christians.”

“We always have relationships in our lives with people we've fallen in love with, who come back into our lives, and we fall in love with them again and go, 'I shouldn't be doing this,' but you can't stop it.”

“Somerset is where I call home, and where I feel most myself.”

“My pub was full of get-rich-quick schemes that never worked - scams, pyramid schemes. People trying to find a way to get themselves out of a rut.”