I never know which is worse: the sorrow when you hit the bird or the shame when you miss it.

It's the gloomy things that need our help, if everything in the garden is sunny, why meddle?

I envy people who can think, 'No, I'm not going to work today' when they have a huge pile of deadlines stacking up.

One of the great injustices in fiction is that on the whole people with romantic yearnings have romantic faces. But in real life it's not always like that.

What's difficult for American audiences is that they're used to a system here where you can get an actor for five years or even seven, and that is signed for at the audition. Whereas in England, no agent will give you an actor for more than three years.

I have fits of melancholia when I watch the news, but we all do, don't we?

I just don't believe in generalisations.