To counter-balance the natural humility of motherhood, I garden ... In the garden, more than any place, I really feel successful.

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.

I used to believe that anything was better than nothing. Now I know that sometimes nothing is better.

I'm less confident now than I've ever been. In this peculiar craft, confidence is something you spend a lifetime losing. I used to be frightened only one night a week but now I'm frightened of every performance. I mean really frightened.

Nobody really needs a mink coat... Except the mink.

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.

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.