R.S. Thomas Quotes

Exoticism can give you an edge: it makes people assume you're cleverer than you are and gives you the upper hand.

I mean my father was killed when I was six. And I only have tiny, tiny flashes of memory.

I never raise my voice!

I think people do work too much. I've never been able to understand the whole 'make hay while the sun shines' thing. Either I want to work or I don't want to work.

I was happy, I wasnt beaten, and I lacked nothing. But it wasnt what people expect - it was very much sort of pinching and scraping. I dont know how my mother did it.

I'm a late developer.

I wouldn't want you to see me all the time on the screen, because I get bored of it myself!

Now, playing a love interest can be really thrilling, if you're working opposite thrilling people.

Everyone loves to hate a spin doctor.

The parts I've been most successful in are the ones I've desperately, desperately wanted.

I have never met a woman who works who doesn't feel guilty. I mean we all deny it like crazy but deep down there is always that voice saying you should be at home.

With the theatre, your whole day is geared towards the evening's show, and that's the job. People usually go to work about 9 and come home around 5, or maybe 7.

People are always saying, English, English, English rose, and I just feel so completely different.

It takes a long time to appreciate one's parents.

French is a foreign language, but I've been speaking it since I was 18 so it's second nature to me.

Films are just consumables.

I'm a bit of a Doubting Thomas - always worrying about things.

After a long time with someone, you realise you've been thinking for two.

Buy, buy, buy, buy! They want to grab you and trap you and turn you into little Elizabeth Hurleys.

Often, the roles I'm offered in England are melancholic women who are filled with regret for the past, regret for their fading beauty.

It doesn't make you feel very good being mean and fierce; it is much nicer playing people who are kind and sweet.

If anyone says 'Let's have a girls' night out', I will run in the opposite direction.

My children are lovely. They're perfect.

Successful films are very dangerous things.

As actors, we're always asked to portray and react to these extreme circumstances, otherwise it's not interesting. They are agonizing things to think about.

If you are a successful actor, which is what I am, then you tend to get labelled very quickly and easily.

I'm not used to being asked what I want to talk about. That's why I'm an actress. Get told what to do, stand on the mark, say your words, wear this, look this way, look that way.

My body is a baby machine.

I know people think that I always play these characters who are in control and can chop someone's head off with a look.

I love shooting French films because I don't have to stick with being sophisticated or stuck-up.

I really like acting in French. It's actually quite different for me, from acting in English. It's fun acting in a foreign language. You're liberated or freed from preconceptions.

I find it very difficult to be two different characters at the same time - actress and mother.

I tend to do things that I'm very frightened of. That's what I do.

I still absolutely love 'The Sound of Music' and anything with Julie Andrews in it.

If you make a film about a pig farmer in Wales and you are a huge hit as the pig farmer's wife, the next thing is you'll be asked to do a film about a sheep farmer in Scotland.

I was terrible at school.

I was very lost as a teenager. Which is a horrible way to feel.

I just don't see very many films. Because I make them.

I do a film because I like the story and I want to give life to a character - I don't necessarily have to agree with the director.

I think the sheer number of pop stars has kind of drowned out, somewhat, our interest. We're just submerged.

I'm very good at forgetting people.

You don't choose a film because it's made by a woman, you choose it because it's good.

Given any new technology for transmitting information, we seem bound to use it for great quantities of small talk. We are only saved by music from being overwhelmed by nonsense.

We are educated to be amazed by the infinite variety of life forms in nature. We are, I believe, only at the beginning of being flabbergasted by its unity.

The whole dear notion of one's own Self-marvelous old free-willed, free- enterprising, autonomous, independent, isolated island of a Self- is a myth.

We are spectacular splendid manifestations of life. We have language. We have affection. And finally, and perhaps best of all, we have music.

I will confess that I have no more sense of what goes on in the mind of mankind than I have for the mind of an ant.

Chemical waste products are the droppings of science.

It's just plain learning something that you didn't know. There is a real aesthetic experience in being dumbfounded.

It is not so bad being ignorant if you are totally ignorant; the hard thing is knowing in some detail the reality of ignorance.