A book is a device to ignite the imagination.

We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.

f they'd been working with Alec Guinness, for instance, they wouldn't have known they were born if they'd not towed the line!

To begin with, it's true, she read with trepidation and some unease. The sheer endlessness of books outfaced her and she had no idea how to go on; there was no system to her reading, with one book leading to another, and often she had two or three on the go at the same time.

If I am doing nothing, I like to be doing nothing to some purpose. That is what leisure means.

If, for instance, we'd made the film after the show had been to Broadway, it would have been exactly the same film but we would have been assured that they would have understood it. We didn't have to do any alterations for Broadway. I was supposed to go a fortnight before it opened to alter anything that was necessary and there was nothing really.

One recipe for happiness is to have to sense of entitlement.' To this she added a star and noted at the bottom of the page: 'This is not a lesson I have ever been in a position to learn.