Oldman: "Over the years, I have been asked to play these sort of scary frenetic characters that express their emotions physically."

Oldman: "Change is vital to any actor. If you keep playing lead after lead, you're really gonna dry up. Because all those vehicles wean you away from the truths of human behaviour."

Oldman: "Political correctness has become a straightjacket."

Oldman: "I was quiet, a loner. I was one of those children where, if you put me in a room and gave me some crayons and a pencils, you wouldn't hear from me for nine straight hours. And I was always drawing racing cars and rockets and spaceships and planes, things that were very fast that would take me away."

Oldman: "My passion and energy get mistaken for anger."

Oldman: "The thing a drama school can't give you is instinct. It can sharpen instinct but that can't be taught, and you have to have intuition. It's an essential ingredient."

Oldman: "Reality TV to me is the museum of social decay."

Oldman: "That's what sets apart one actor from another, and that you can't teach. You can't give someone that. When you're working, putting a character together, or in a scene, that's where things will happen that you have to have the intuition to notice them, and to register them."

Oldman: "What other people think of me is none of my business."

Oldman: "It's becoming increasingly harder and harder; there's no such thing as independent film anymore. There aren't any, they don't exist. In the old days you could go and get a certain amount of the budget with foreign sales, now everybody wants a marketable angle."

Oldman: "Culturally, politically, everywhere you look... Read the newspaper. Go online. Our world has gone to hell."

Oldman: "Your own barometer is all you have to go by, and often what makes a good director is knowing when not to say something. On occasions you can find yourself on a film set where the person who is wearing the director's hat is only trying to justify his position."

Oldman: "Overall I enjoy a certain anonymity. I live a very normal, very ordinary life."

Oldman: "A lazy man works twice as hard. My mother told that to me, and now I say it to my kids. If you're writing an essay, keep it in the lines and in the margins so you don't have to do it over."

Oldman: "I'm probably a Libertarian, if I had to put myself in any category. But you don't come out and talk about these things, for obvious reasons."

Oldman: "Being an actor is a good way to earn a living. And to meet fabulous people. It's great to live very comfortably. I've been lucky, I've had a lot of fun with great roles, but it is true that if I were extremely rich, I would stop and I would go to play football on a beach in the Caribbean with my children."

Oldman: "I hadn't worked for a couple of years so I thought it would be nice to earn some money and pay the bills."

Oldman: "I drank for about 25 years getting over the loss of my father and I took the anger out on myself. I did a good job at beating myself up at sometimes. I don't drink anymore but my alcoholic head occasionally says different. 'Nil By Mouth' was a love letter to my father because I needed to resolve some issues in order to be able to forgive him."

Oldman: "It's funny: I'm a lifelong musician, but because I principally play the piano it's been a solitary thing."

Oldman: "I know what it means to do a job... I worked in a factory. I respect people in the service industry. What irritates me more is when people aren't respectful. There's a lot of nonsense behavior, especially in a place like Hollywood. The money, the power, they create little monsters."

Oldman: "I did have a knack for playing weirdos. There's still sort of this perception of me out there as being this crazy guy."

Oldman: "Growing up in a particular neighborhood, growing up in a working-class family, not having much money, all of those things fire you and can give you an edge, can give you an anger."

Oldman: "Speaking very generally, I find that women are spiritually, emotionally, and often physically stronger than men."

Oldman: "You can play older than yourself. You can play younger than yourself up to a point, and then that just becomes impossible because you carry a weight with you that you can't shift, unless you have very boyish looks."

Oldman: "You choose your friends by their character and your socks by their color."

Oldman: "At the Oscars, if you didn't vote for '12 Years a Slave,' you were a racist. You have to be very careful about what you say. I do have particular views and opinions that most of this town doesn't share, but it's not like I'm a fascist or a racist. There's nothing like that in my history."