It was so soon after I'd had my son and I really wasn't planning on going back to work for a while. I will walk over hot coals to work with Bill Condon on anything, the experience that you have with him is just too good... I've certainly never worked with him before so the trio of Bill [Codon], Ian [McKellen], and Sherlock Holmes, and England: it was too much to say "no" to.

When your life is being threatened there's an instinctive urge to fight. You fight for the time you have, for your relationships.

People's view of cancer will change when they have their own relationship with cancer, which everyone will, at some point.

I am very lucky, because for the most part people are very nice to me, and I am still able to go about my life and ride the subway and all that.

When you tell people, your world changes, your identity changes and people treat you differently. And then, not only do you have to deal with your own emotional response to what's going on, but you take on everybody else's emotional response.

Some people's personalities are so compelling that they command attention.

I get very, very, very irritable with people who complain about getting old, because I know a lot of people who would gladly trade places with us. I'm not saying it's easy, I'm not saying it doesn't hurt your feelings, I'm not saying it's not painful - and physically as well as mentally and spiritually - and it's frightening at times. However, people have really lost perspective, and it's a really bizarre topic of conversation that it's become a cultural peg in our world that aging is a bad thing. It's not logical to me.