Constantly worrying about your reflection and criticizing your body, shape and size is an act of violence against yourself.

We have to reinvest, I think, in the idea of articulacy as a form of personal human freedom and power.

My husband is here and I'd like to thank him, for many things, but first of all for pointing out that I had a big hole in my frock and then that my nipples were pointing in different directions. It's good to have an expert there to help you with that sort of thing.

I've never been on the cover of Empire. I'm very bitter. I've got an award but now I feel sad and cross.

The flashbacks are parallel for me. You experience two storylines at the same time, and I'm not switching from one time to another.

And it's absolutely true that male sexual behaviour and female responses to male demands change a lot when they start communicating - and the levels of the communication that I've seen on the ground in very, very poor areas are so high and I think why don't we have that here?

Children are much more understanding of the suddenness and arbitrariness of death than we are. The old fairy tales contain a lot of that, and we've stolen from them, just as they stole from Greek myth, which has that same mixture of pre-Christian chaos.