John Rhys-Davies

“I do not want to see a society where, should I ever have any, my granddaughters have their fingernails pulled out because they are wearing nail varnish.”

“As I come towards the end of my life, you get to see things in a slightly different perspective.”

“Unkindness is quite a major sin.”

“Hollywood is a far safer place to work than working abroad, because of the skill level, and because of the safety considerations that experience and unionization have created.”

“Western Europeans are not having any babies.”

“Basically, theater or film is a dangerous industrial environment.”

“The word 'career' and 'actor' really don't fit in the same paragraph, let alone sentence. There is no career structure for actors.”

“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.”

“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.”

“When you get back to fundamental questions - 'Why should anything exist?' A, I'm not sure what the answer is in terms of the science, and B, I'm not sure that science can even ask that question.”

“No one should be allowed to stand for Parliament without proof that he has taken responsibility for other people.”

“With a bad script and even the best cast, the most you can hope for is to turn a sow's ear into a silk purse.”

“I'm a little smarter than most.”

“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.”

“A solitary child growing up in Africa, you're really quite dependent on books.”

“I think your children are your measure of success, regardless of work and career.”

“Actors are always looking for actor-proof parts. A part so good you can't screw it up!”

“When the writers themselves are a bit out of control, and their lives are collapsing around them, they seem to rejoice in misery and celebrate the wrong sort of things.”

“How stupid do you have to be to imagine that you can turn 'The Lord Of The Rings' into a film script?”

“When you've opened your heart to a child as you have to, there's always the fear that you may discover that the child is not viable. Losing that child is not a position you want to find yourself in.”