comedy ... is much harder to do than drama. It's not true that laugh and the world laughs with you. It's very hard to make a group of people laugh at the same thing; much easier to make them cry at the same thing. ... That's why great comic acting is probably the greatest acting there is.

I can't actually see myself putting make-up on my face at the age of sixty, but I can see myself going on a camel train to Samarkand.

I have been disappointed many times, but never defeated.

it is extraordinary how much you are theirs, and how little they are yours. The child grows inside you and there is something mystical and mythical in that, but then you actually see that you are nothing more than the box in which they come. There is this total person, already formed, themselves.

If, as an actor, you allow yourself to be cocooned from the boring pin-pricks of day-to-day existence - like standing in a queue at the butcher's or any of the other dreary little events that we all have in our daily lives - you begin to lose your lifeline to what people are. And if you lose that, you eventually lose the ability to act.

It's appalling that there have to be movements organized to give human beings the right to be human beings in the eyes of other human beings.

Being an actress has something in common with being a housewife. They both look terribly easy to someone who hasn't done them. And the easier it looks, probably the better you are doing your job.