My favourite authors include Trollope and Dickens.

Building your own house is a primal urge, one of those universal genetic drives like the need to provide for your family.

Sustainability is now a big baggy sack in which people throw all kinds of old ideas, hot air and dodgy activities in order to be able to greenwash their products and feel good.

Building your own home is about desire, fantasy. But it's achievable; anyone can do it.

I don't look at what people do with their homes in terms of money, but the social and personal value of what they're trying to do and achieve.

Architecture was pretty much the sexiest thing to be doing from 1700-1800.

It's possible to be satisfied with a day's work or a cake, but a life... what is a life but a history of events badly remembered?

Every breath we take as human beings damages the planet.

Generally speaking, I think that if you do anything with commitment and passion, it will come good.

Living an environmentally responsible lifestyle can seem like a Scrooge-like list of don'ts. Don't take that flight, don't buy that car, don't eat those blueberries flown in from somewhere far-flung.

I'm terribly fastidious. I like symmetry and neatness, but my house is as chaotic as any other family's.

Women would rather talk to other women than to men, even when they would rather talk to a man than to a woman.

She could see that to lose a sibling was hard: it could only seem unnatural:out of time, out of order, a vicious re-run of your own departure into nothingness.

Caesar had perished from the world of men Had not his sword been rescued by his pen.

What is pink? A rose is pink By the fountain's brink.

If you don't know how to live, why wonder about death?

Our army is composed of the scum of the earth - the mere scum of the earth.

I'm 40 next year and I'm very well aware that where I am now, it becomes a bit of a wilderness for actresses.

The reign of God is his reign over all things.

Henry James proposed asking of art three modest and appropriate questions: What is the artist trying to do? Does he do it? Was it worth doing?

There's no excuse to hit a woman... Ever. Not even in a movie role, because you might really like it. And then what?