A passion for any novel, and any character, can crystallise your ideas when you really need to be as open as possible as a performer.

I can't spend the rest of my life being pretty in a bonnet.

My alter egos have changed a lot over the years. When I was a child, I was a black horse called Storm. Whinnying and jumping over bamboo poles in the garden took up pretty much my entire childhood.

Female ambition is such a complicated thing to play because it is an aggressive quality, and people respond very badly to women exhibiting any kind of aggression.

I can only do something that my sister or my daughter, if I have one, could watch and feel positive about.

I don't really want to do things that I feel like are going to send out a message that I don't really want to sign up for.

I realise there's an innate paradox in promoting oneself on the one hand and saying, 'Oh, I don't want to be famous,' on the other.

We live in a society where children are expected to become adults overnight.

Motherhood so often comes in conflict with women's capacity to express and live their own lives.

I have always been interested in gender politics, so I'm not that keen on doing things that don't represent a truth about women.

I just don't believe you're capable of being an actor unless you have a desire to experience your emotions in a public way.

Music lifted our spirit.

I learned not to confuse 'busy' with 'productive,' but I'm still far too addicted to email to resist its early-morning digital snuggles.

I don’t like San Francisco. I love it!

It has been shown that, in contrast to everything which classical national economy has hitherto taught, not the producer but the consumer is the ruling factor in economic life.

Anyone can write a specification, but if nobody implements it, what is it but a particularly dry form of science fiction.

I realised in Sri Lanka that my dream of playing in a World Cup was a bridge too far.

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life. Football is four 15-minute quarters. Plus timeouts and commercials.

There was also the myth of the western films. But my films are borrowed not from the story of the West in America but from the story of cinema.

With all my songs, I try to pull from personal experiences, like moving and changing locations.

The whole earth is in jail and we're plotting this incredible jailbreak.