My childhood was a happy one, spent in a tall house in South Kensington and later in East Sussex, but my early and mid teens were less successful.

If you're in the movie or in television, your failures are very public, and so are your successes. You weigh them up against each other, really.

My childhood was a happy one, spent in a tall house in South Kensington and later in East Sussex, but my early and mid teens were less successful.

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.

In my defence I can only say that her past, too, like mine, like everyone's in fact, was a locked box. Occasionally we allow people a peep, but generally only at the top level. The darker streams of our memories we negotiate alone.

You never know people, do you? You can work with 'em for twenty years; you don't know 'em at all.

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