Unfortunately, I experienced some sexual abuse. It was a known and admitted fact of life amongst us that there was this particular man, and you didn't want to be left in the dressing room with him. It took many years to come to terms with it and to forgive those incidents that I felt had deeply hurt me.

When you come back to a country that you've left, you're in a very peculiar situation because, in a way, you don't belong to that country any more, even though when I'm in America I feel I don't belong there either.

I called Kevin Spacey one day about something else, but he didnt say to me calm down, like The New York Times said. Because I was not deranged.

Viking women were able to rule kingdoms, divorce husbands, own land, and Vikings were very progressive in terms of the rights of women.

It was either Voltaire or Charlie Sheen who said, 'We are born alone. We live alone. We die alone. And anything in between that can give us the illusion that we're not, we cling to.'

I attended the bedside of a friend who was dying in a Dublin hospital. She lived her last hours in a public ward with a television blaring out a football match, all but drowning our final conversation.

I still cannot fathom how difficult it was for the women I met to find out that they were HIV-positive. It is such a courageous undertaking in countries where there is still considerable stigma about the disease. They got tested to ensure that their unborn babies would have a chance of life by being born free of the virus.