If you build a career on being a beautiful young woman, that's going to be a short career. I have to establish I can act. I don't want to have to visit the plastic surgeon every two years.

I don't think atheism means one does not believe in a spiritual life. I think it means one does not follow the tenets of the established religions.

I loved living in Hollywood - and the weather there was just fantastic - but there is something about rural England, and especially Suffolk and Norfolk, that pulls at my heartstrings.

At 50 you're more confident, more comfortable in your skin and you don't put up with nonsense, especially from men.

What I do for a living is re-create human emotion, and that's a pretty weird thing to do from nine till five.

My preferred environment is by the sea or somewhere rural. I don't want to be in a city, I don't want to visit New York and I don't want to go shopping.

I had no idea 'L.A. Law' would be so mega. I knew it was a big show, but I was just one actress in a group of many good, award-winning actresses.

I watch an awful lot of old Hollywood movies - Ill devour anything with Bette Davis or Joan Crawford. My absolute favourite is Sunset Boulevard starring Gloria Swanson.

If all you're doing is making money, you have a luxurious but empty life.

Your roots, your family, your friends all become so much more important to you as you get older, especially if you are a wandering minstrel like me.

I watch an awful lot of old Hollywood movies - I'll devour anything with Bette Davis or Joan Crawford. My absolute favourite is 'Sunset Boulevard' starring Gloria Swanson.

Everyone is overcoming something, be gentle.

All bad things, like good things, must end.

The best effect of fine persons is felt after we have left their presence.

On the trail of another man the biographer must put up with finding himself at every turn: any biography uneasily shelters an autobiography within it.

In Hollywood a marriage is a success if it outlasts milk.

I dreamt I was forced to eat 25lb of marshmallows. When I woke up, my pillow was missing.

You cannot be born and you cannot die because you don't even exist ... in the sense that you think of existence.

That in controversies respecting property, and in suits between man and man, the ancient trial by jury is preferable to any other, and ought to be held sacred.

Not everyone has a purpose.

A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory.