Quotes from Benedict Cumberbatch

I haven't done period dramas back-to-back, or really anything back-to-back. You get asked to do what you're most recently famed for, so I'm careful of not repeating myself.

I'm a Prince of Wales Trust ambassador, so I'm all about giving youth an education, a voice and a chance to not take the wrong road.

I love doing impersonations of people.

The world of 'Sherlock Holmes' and the world that we live in now is big enough to take more than one interpretation.

I had a real yearning to make use of the opportunities I had at school. When I heard about the gap year of teaching English at a Tibetan monastery, I knew I had to do something about it really quickly, otherwise it was going to get allocated.

I'm not confident in social situations; just going up to someone in a bar and saying 'Hi' is going to be even more difficult because they won't know the real me. They will just know me as a fictional person I play on the screen.

You come into this world as you leave it, on your own. It's made me want to live a life slightly less ordinary.

People always want to knock you when you're up.

I realised quite early on that, although I wasn't trying to make a career speciality of it, I was playing slightly asexual, sociopathic intellectuals.

Doctors and nurses do crazy hours and keep an ideal afloat through the love and care that they have for their craft and their patients and the institution of the NHS. We should be very proud of it.

I'm interested in art for all. I don't want it to be only the sons and daughters of Tory MPs who get to see my plays.

I love theatre, and you learn too much as an actor and enjoy too much of it not to want to go back a lot.

Maybe it's just getting older, but I don't want to miss things.

I'm not loyal to one genre. I want to mix it up.

The further you get away from yourself, the more challenging it is. Not to be in your comfort zone is great fun.

If you have an over-preoccupation with perception and trying to please people's expectations, then you can go mad.

When you see a good horseman, you're unable to tell where the instruction is coming from. It's like telepathy.

Metaphorically speaking, it's easy to bump into one another on the journey from A to B and not even notice. People should take time to notice, enjoy and help each other.

Someone will always hate what I say. There's always going to be somebody spitting blood about my wooden-faced, toffee-named, crappy acting.

To get a horse to hit a mark without a rider, to get it to stand up, to get it to rear, to get it to pick up a bucket and bring it over is amazing. It's hard work and very rewarding but can be dangerous.

If I'd had fame early on, I'd have been able to abuse it in the way that a young man should.

I know he [Julian Assange] is a man of fierce determination, and now living under the strain of house arrest in the Ecuadorean embassy as a "political exile," as he calls himself.

New York City is crazy and beautiful and really close to my heart, and I've always had dear friends here - family, actually, I would say.

When you're a kid, 'Star Trek' is a slower burn. It's funny, it's entertaining, but it also has a maturity about it - which is its universal appeal, I think.