Johnny Depp

I've had the honor and the pleasure and gift of having known Elizabeth Taylor for a number of years. You know, you sit down with her, she slings hash, she sits there and cusses like a sailor, and she's hilarious.

America is dumb. It's like a dumb puppy that has big teeth that can bite and hurt you - aggressive. My daughter is four; my boy is one. I'd like them to see America as a toy - a broken toy. Investigate it a little, check it out, get this feeling, and then get out.

What attracted me to Jimmy Bulger were the various facets of his personality and his humanity because I felt that the only way I could approach playing a character like him was to find his human side first and then map that out to see where it took the turn. He was a very complicated man.

The phrase 'mad as a hatter' was coined because hat makers were poisoned by the high levels of mercury used in felt processing; these workers developed a strange, uneven gait as well as strange alterations in their personalities - traits that resembled mental instability.

The historical novelist has to consider what has actually happened, while the SF writer is dealing in possibilities, but they are both in the business of imagining a world unlike our own and yet connected to it.