No, I always wanted to be an actress.

I have sleepless nights before press days.

I'd been gearing up to working in theatre since coming out of drama school, but it was an exciting time for TV drama - it was the birth of Channel 4, and Brookside was very cutting-edge at the time.

I like to think I'm a listener, and I'm fascinated by observing people - I suppose you just lock that in.

I think you know what you're up against when you take on a piece that you know is going to involve dragging up a lot emotions - you can end up being deeply immersed in gloom.

It always interests me how obsessed people are about age.

If I want to run around a field when I'm 70, I would like to have that option.

Running gave me a focus to start looking after myself, to eat properly, and focus on building up my strength.

I always start from scratch with a character - they're never based on anyone else. You get ideas of what people look like, and I'm a great people watcher. You can draw inspiration from people.

Whatever I'm doing, I try to give it everything.

Being an actor is an extension of telling a story and I loved story telling as a child.

Every minute doing one thing is a minute not doing something else. Every choice is another choice not made another path grown over lost.

Women don't realize how much store men set on the regularity of their habits. We absorb their comings and goings into our bodies, their rhythms into our bones.

I played volleyball, basketball, softball, and I started to love soccer the most around 7-8 years old because it was a physical game. I could use my speed and strength to my advantage.

That is the fearful part of having been near death. One knows how easy it is to die. The barriers that are up for everybody else are down for you, and you've only to slip through.

These divisions in the international community - the Syrians bear quite a lot of the blame, but we have enabled it by the divisions between us.

Lay me down like a stone oh God, and raise me up like a new bread".

The spirit of democracy cannot be superimposed from the outside. It must come from within.

Mondays I sleep. I go in at ten, do my lift, watch the game from the day before. Tuesday is off, but I go in, lift, watch film. Then I have French toast with my sister.

No matter whether you are a physician, a teacher, or a clergyman, if you can give increase of life to others and make them sensible of that fact, they will be attracted to you, and you will get rich.

You can get in a cab in Vancouver and the 20-year-old driver speaks more knowingly of Michael Ovitz than anyone in the industry. They just know! And it's perhaps not unhealthy.