Paparazzi arrived for Hugh [Grant]. We had to stand under a tree and smile for them.Photographer: 'Hugh, could you look less -- um --'Hugh: 'Pained?

Difficult for actors to extemporise in nineteenth-century English. Except for Robert Hardy and Elizabeth Spriggs, who speak that way anyway.

Can he love her? Can the soul really be satisfied with such polite affections? To love is to burn - to be on fire, like Juliet or Guinevere or Eloise...

Hugh Laurie (playing Mr. Palmer) felt the line 'Don't palm all your abuses [of language upon me]' was possibly too rude. 'It's in the book, ' I said. He didn't hit me.

Lindsay [Doran] goes round the table and introduces everyone -- making it clear that I am present in the capacity of writer rather than actress, therefore no one has to be too nice to me.

I ask Laurie if it's possible to get trained fish. Lindsay says this is how we know I've never produced a movie.

Jane reminds us that God is in his heaven, the monarch on his throne and the pelvis firmly beneath the ribcage. Apparently rock and roll liberated the pelvis and it hasn't been the same since.

(On period costume posture coaching:)"We all stand about like parboiled spaghetti being straightened out.

Your misery is everyone else's entertainment.

Getting hurt and narrowly escaping death is sort of a thing for me.

Lately I've been struck with how I really love what you can't see in a photograph. An actual physical darkness. And it's very thrilling for me to see darkness again.

The most fundamental form of human stupidity is forgetting what we were trying to do in the first place.

I've always loved acoustic music because I've always loved to hear someone's words or just watch them and just get into them. The distancing thing about rock is it's so assaulting.

Christianity is an entirely new way of being human.

Every piece of legislation which came to my desk in the coming years as the governor, I came down on the side of preserving the sanctity of life.

When you know that something is dying inside you, you learn not to put much trust in the random vitalities of the fleeting moment.

It is really important that young people find something that they want to do and pursue it with passion. I'm very passionate about filmmaking. It's what I love to do.

I think a lot of people get into stand-up to be the center of attention, which is perfectly legitimate. But I think I got in there to be heard.