My parents have a strong work ethic, but their attitude to life, their philosophy, is: 'whatever makes you happy.

You only do good work when you're taking risks and pushing yourself.

I sort of fall in love with every character I do; you have to understand how they became what they've become, whether they're the ugly kind or the very beautiful kinds of characters.

You think that adulthood will hit and you'll suddenly be more capable. But that doesn't happen, ever, does it?

My knees buckled. It's the last thing I expected

My feet are like something from another age - prehistoric and troll-like. I keep expecting them to talk, they have that much character.

I love acting but I also love writing, especially comedy.

You can't be a woman and not be a feminist, I don't think. If you care about the world and the world you exist in and your rights.

I'll try and get through as much as my voice and nerves and knees will let me.

I never come away from a film thinking I nailed it.

I love disappearing. That's what acting is. For me it's about putting on a persona, stepping into a pair of shoes. It's my face, but I'm using it as a tool for that spirit, that character.

I'm an insomniac, my mind works the night shift.

...if ever you hear a man telling you that you must be happy, that it’s your natural right, that your first duty is to yourself—that will be the man who’s not after your soul.

Love and delight are better teachers than compulsion.

Documentary is, therefore, an approach, which makes use of the artistic faculties to give vivification to fact - to use Walt Whitman's definition of the place of poetry in the modern world.

Change the world is maybe Obama's job.

How to save the old that's worth saving, whether in landscape, houses, manners, institutions, or human types, is one of our greatest problems, and the one that we bother least about.

When the generation after me started getting on the cut, a lot of them would call me over to hang out or go jam and scratch and they were always separate from each other.

It might be said that all knowledge is linked to the essential forms of cruelty.

I wear things that kind of can look good for extended periods of time - fabrics that don't wrinkle, things that don't stain very easily.

It is where we embrace our questions. . . . Can we listen with our whole beings, not just our minds, and offer our attention rather than our opinions?