Quotes from John Rhys-Davies

Films are fun, but life is much richer.

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

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

My parents were always Welsh-speaking and very proud of Wales.

I'd love to spend more time on the Isle of Man. I love the anonymity of putting on a boiler suit and going down to buy parts for the compressor. And Norman Wisdom's a neighbour; I salute him occasionally.

'Indiana Jones' wasn't physically tough, but they are the only two films I've ever been ill on. On 'The Last Crusade,' I got sciatica. That's when the sciatic nerve, which goes through the funny hole in your pelvis down your leg, swells and rubs against the nerves.

Actors endow the villain in fiction with a warmth and quality that makes them memorable. I think we like fictional villains because they're the Mr. Hyde of our own dreams. I've met a few real villains in my time, and they weren't the least bit sympathetic.

There's nothing like the discipline of having to work on a cold film set on the Danubian plain in Bulgaria. Boy, does it get cold.

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.

Intellectually, now, I believe that it is a complete vanity to say positively there is no God.

Western Europeans are not having any babies.

Many do not understand how precarious Western civilization is and what a joy it is. From it, we get real democracy. From it, we get the sort of intellectual tolerance that allows me to propound something that may be completely alien to you.

It's not hard to get people to take a premise and accept it.

If I had a bloody tattoo for every film I'd done, I'd be a walking billboard.

I enjoy acting. It's not that I begin to think I'm getting better. I now fully know that I've made no improvement whatsoever since I was 20. I can live with it.

We live in a modest system, a galaxy called the Milky Way. If we named every star in the Milky Way and put them in the Hollywood telephone directory and stacked those telephone directories up, we'd have a pile of telephone directories 70 miles high.

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

Sometimes you learn more from films that aren't terribly successful and, indeed, sometimes you learn more from real disasters than you do from the ones that succeed.

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.

I used to fly airplanes myself, so being above the ground doesn't worry me too much.

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.

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.

In the film world, we can all be heroes. In the real world, where heroism can cost you your life or the life of the ones you love, people aren't so willing to make those sacrifices. When they do, they are set apart from the rest of us.

I've always been attracted to films which explore the qualities of courage.