Hospitals are very extreme places - you can be in a maternity room one minute, and by someone's bedside as they're dying the next.

- James Purefoy

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.

- James Purefoy

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.

- James Purefoy

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.

- James Purefoy

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

- James Purefoy

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

- James Purefoy

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

- James Purefoy

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.

- James Purefoy

One of the things I like about doing historical films is drawing the line between now and then.

- James Purefoy

I'm a serial monogamist.

- James Purefoy

I was very unmotivated at school.

- James Purefoy

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.

- James Purefoy

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

- James Purefoy

I have to travel a lot for work.

- James Purefoy

I have no problem with television as a genre.

- James Purefoy

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.

- James Purefoy

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

- James Purefoy

British actors are pretty good, by and large, at turning on at 'action' and off at 'cut.'

- James Purefoy

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

- James Purefoy

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

- James Purefoy