JAMES PUREFOY

You know, people aren't watching a network: they're watching cable channels.

Violence is a very ugly thing. Violence is often so casual on film, and made to look so cool and so sexy, but violence is a repulsive, repugnant act that human beings inflict on each other. It shouldn't seem to be cool and sexy, ever really.

I really like playing people who are exciting to watch and who burn brightly.

I'm a serial monogamist.

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

I do live a weirdly divided life, because I'm not a Hollywood superstar, I don't live on Malibu Beach, I don't do massive 'OK!' spreads, I don't go to premieres and parties that much.

I was very unmotivated at school.

I love all things Apple and have done since 1996.

One of the great things about being an actor is that you have a completely different challenge every few months.

As an actor you have to get used to receiving gentle little pies in the face.

If you find yourself always playing the villain, or if you find yourself being typecast into a corner where you're not happy then that's probably rather miserable, but if I have been typecast I am quite happy about it.

Airport security is a particular bugbear. At the risk of sounding like a grumpy old man, while I can see that averting terrorism is manifestly important, the measures taken seem, simultaneously, absurd.

I think the business affairs people at the studios get some kind of perverse satisfaction in finding the worst hotels for actors to stay in.

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

I'm not a big fan of patterns. I like the unexpected.

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

There are only a few TV networks that really invest in production in the way that I think they should. HBO, obviously, is one of them.

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.

I have to travel a lot for work.

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

I'm on record saying that HBO is the best television company in the world, and I believe they are. I think they absolutely understand how to make television that is really, really vital and interesting and visceral, and all the things that television really should be.

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.

Dieting isn't complicated: if you eat 2,000 calories, you have to burn it off; simple as that.

I have no problem with television as a genre.

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