I dont have the confidence to be a personality.

Shakespeare's taught me that there are more words in the English language than I have got in my head.

Shakespeare showed me that once I understand the rules, I can break them.

My mother was adorable, a great giggler. My father was very strong and could be quite frightening.

I don't want to be a director, or to have responsibility for hundreds of people.

I have lots of passions - gardens, art, music and reading. I have eclectic taste and read a huge variety of books.

I don't know any woman who is happy with her looks. I certainly wouldn't want to be friends with anyone who was.

And children? 'I don't have any regrets about not having had children. What's the point? It's just something else to beat yourself up over.

I'm constantly intimidated by Shakespeare's work. Trying to decipher what he's saying and holding on to that thought - not just as an actor, but as a human being - is a rigour.

I absolutely hate clothes shopping, though I love clothes. It's my idea of heaven to be handed things to wear.

As You Like It' was the first Shakespeare production I ever did.

It had ever, as I told the reader, been one of the singular blessings of my life, to be almost every hour of it miserably in love with some one....

Government is a gun that shoots money at your enemy and blows up in your face.

Do the thing that scares you.

A twenty-three-year-long study in Ohio determined that people who saw growing older as something positive lived a whopping seven and a half years longer than those who didn’t. (356)

Boredom is a concept that I don't understand.

Michael Winterbottom is one of the great directors of this century.

Poetry is the most intimate of all writing. I want to speak first from me to myself and then from me to you.

It's just hard to have a nuanced discussion with like a thousand people, 30 of which are white-power skinheads.

The artist's task consists of making one thing of many, and a world from the smallest part of a thing.

If life must not be taken too seriously, then so neither must death.