Maggie Smith has a unique sense of comedy, based on a somewhat ironic view of real life, making it both funnier and more sad. But perhaps her greatest ability, or at least the one that most intrigues me, is how she can convey deep and powerful emotion without a trace of sentimentality.

When you are desperate to get someone who isn't all that interested in you, you lay siege as hard as you can.

You are my whole existence and I will love you until my last breath.

Vulgarity is no substitute for wit.

A lot of actors find it impossible not to ask for the audience's sympathy. They have a need to twinkle.

What is a week-end? Maggie Smith in Downton Abbey.

Lust, that state commonly known as 'being in love,' is a kind of madness. It is a distortion of reality so remarkable that it should, by rights, enable most of us to understand the other forms of lunacy with the sympathy of fellow-sufferers. But, paradoxically, mad and suffering as one is, and the heat of the flame, few of us are glad as we feel that passion slip away No, while most people have been at their unhappiest when in love, it is nevertheless the state the human being yearns for above all.