As a child, I wanted to marry a farmer, but no doubt the reality would have been very different to the idyll in my head.

It makes me upset, if not angry, when people assume that there can be no morality without a religious framework. If there's a moral framework without all that religious stuff, it's more valuable.

I swim more or less every day.

I try to be classic without being mumsy.

I've never particularly liked the idea of looking back; I'd rather look forward

I look at myself objectively and in a way I see myself as a commodity. Your name becomes somehow outside yourself. Now, when I'm at home being Mrs. Scarfe, that's when I'm most myself.

I know some actresses who used to be older than me who are now younger than me - I don't know how they do it.

I think one wants lots of different lives.

I think all good writing is a struggle. To write as well as you feel you can has to be a struggle, almost by definition, because you could always improve.

We get a lot of overseas people wanting to order cakes.

Listening to my regular favourites - Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms and so on - I always feel, quite misguidedly, that nothing can be too bad if such beauty and brilliance exists in the world.

I think we're all aiming to be something better than what everyone thinks we were born to be

When we learn to loosen our grip and leave our own beaten path, accepting his perfect plan, we give God the opportunity to be our navigator as he reveals the beauty of his creation.

In the age of television image becomes more important than substance.

Sometimes life's so much cooler when you just don't know any better and all the painful lessons have not hammered your head open yet.

The seeds of greatness are ideas you learn from people who've been great in their service to others.

Half the hoes hate, half them love me. The ones that hate me only hate me cuz they ain't [expletive] me.

There are some books that reached through the noise of life to grab you by the collar and speak only of the truest things.

Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is.

He moved like a dancer, which is not surprising; a horse is a beautiful animal, but it is perhaps most remarkable because it moves as if it always hears music.

Some guys leave a place after a long time, and they're bitter. Not me.