"As a kid I quite fancied the romantic, Bohemian idea of being an artist. I expect I thought I could escape from the difficulties of maths and spelling. Maybe I thought I would avoid the judgement of the establishment"

"I'd like to be played as a child by Natalie Wood. I'd have some romantic scenes as Audrey Hepburn and have gritty black-and-white scenes as Patricia Neal"

"In terms of the romantic kind of lead, I just never enjoy those movies very much. Maybe they'll come to interest me more as I get older. I doubt it, but maybe. Romantic comedies tend to be, for me, an oxymoron"

"I am a hopeless romantic and I love to spoil my girlfriends"

"And I think maybe all women, if they just had a chance, would be romantic and believe in love and not sex. And men believe in sex and not love"

"In the West audiences think I am a stereotyped action star, or that I always play hitmen or killers. But in Hong Kong, I did a lot of comedy, many dramatic films, and most of all, romantic roles, lots of love stories. I was like a romance novel hero"

"I don't think that digital photography is romantic yet. It's not sympathetic the way that film is"

"By all but the pathologically romantic, it is now recognized that this is not the age of the small man"

"The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young"

"I'm a romantic; a sentimental person thinks things will last, a romantic person hopes against hope that they won't"

"I love romantic comedies. I like to watch them and I like to be in them. It's something that's increasingly difficult to find that spark of originality that makes if different than the ones that come before"