ANTHONY DANIELS

I don't do that many appearances at conventions. I like to keep them special for me. And for the fans, I hope.

Over the years, I've loved being on stage with an orchestra, waving my hands around.

On a film set everyone is very cool. Well, blase really.

Don't call me a mindless philosopher, you overweight glob of grease.

Two or three notes of music can instantly make you feel sad or tense or afraid or angry. To do that in words is much more difficult.

Everybody uses mime and gesture in real life, though we don't realize it. It's very useful as a performance technique, though it can be boring to watch on its own.

You know, a lot of people are loath to go to an orchestral concert because they are intimidated by the thought.

We have people being a little uncomfortable in their life on Earth with finances and so on, so Science Fantasy or Science Fiction allows people to think that there are possibilities beyond the gravity of our planet.

I quite like post-apocalyptic films, things like 'Mad Max' for instance, because they are so full on and there is something quite cleansing about the post-apocalyptic because you can see where we all think we're heading.

We seem to be made to suffer. It's our lot in life.

I have a greater appreciation for kitchen appliances, having played one.

The tattoo has a profound meaning: the superficiality of modern man's existence.

If we can sympathise only with the utterly blameless, then we can sympathise with no one, for all of us have contributed to our own misfortunes - it is a consequence of the human condition that we should. But it does nobody any favours to disguise from him the origins of his misfortunes, and pretend that they are all external to him in circumstances in which they are not.

Childhood in large parts of modern Britain, at any rate, has been replaced by premature adulthood, or rather adolescence

[There] is no class so dangerous as the idle educated.

The attempt to regulate relations between people too closely, by means of the law, in the name of an abstraction such as equality, leads to both absurdity and cruelty. The British are fast turning themselves into a nation of slaves, where even the slave-masters are not free.

Blanket compassion will shift the distribution decisively towards the manipulative end of the spectrum, and may paradoxically decrease the compassion with which the genuinely despairing are treated: for they are apt to get lost in the great mass of pseudo-distress and manipulation, and often their conduct draws less attention precisely because it is less attention-seeking.

Where hopes are unrealistic, fears often become exaggerated; where dreams alone are blueprints, nightmares result.

Children in school are not students, they are pupils. It is typical of certain kinds of politicians that they should regard children as adults, the better subsequently, and consequently, to regard adults as children.

It is strange, is it not, how the more strenuously we deny the importance of race in human affairs, the more obsessed with it and the touchier on the subject we grow.

It is curious how an age of public self-revelation, and of the use of psychological jargon, should also be an age when self-examination is rarely practised.

If a lack of money had prevented people from improving their lot, then mankind would still be living in the caves: unless you believe that investment capital first arrived from outer space.

Having been issued the false prospectus of happiness through unlimited sex, modern man concludes, when he is not happy with his life, that his sex has not been unlimited enough. If welfare does not eliminate squalor, we need more welfare; if sex does not bring happiness, we need more sex.

It is easy to be lenient at other people's expense, and call it generosity of mind.

In the modern view, unbridled personal freedom is the only good to be pursued; any obstacle to it is a problem to be overcome.