People think I'm thick because of the characters I play. I think I'm brighter than the characters. Well, I hope I am.

With your own children, you love them immediately - and with grandchildren, it's exactly the same.

You can't converse with Alzheimer's sufferers in the way you do with others; the dialogue tends to go round in circles.

I'm very good at being out of work.

With all the lines I have to learn for TV scripts, I don't think I have any problems with forgetfulness - that's brain exercise enough for me.

My mum Mary was always a bright, confident and fiercely independent lady.

With something like cancer, there is a feeling that you can fight it in some way or control your response to it, but with dementia there is the fear of losing control of your mind and your life.

Walking is my main method of relaxation. I don't go over my lines or try to solve the world's problems, I just enjoy the scenery and the wildlife.

I've been going to Bamburgh for holidays since I was a child.

My family have been around Northumberland for five generations.

The more telly you do, the more it feels like a factory.

If someone wanted to have a grudge against me, or didn't agree with my lifestyle, the way I breathed, the space I took up on this planet, they had an open door to 'report' to the powers that be.

If you have men who will only come if they know there is a good road, I don't want them. I want men who will come if there is no road at all.

The contradiction in perspective was that it structured all images of reality to address a single spectator who, unlike God, could only be in one place at a time.

Good ideas have expiration dates. You need to act before they become dated, irrelevant or otherwise spoiled.

I listen to the gunfire we cannot hear, and begin this journey with the light of knowing the root of my own furious love.

Feed your faith and starve your doubts.

I'd like to do more Shakespeare. I'd like to do Iago in Othello. I look so benign. It would be interesting to see that black evil come out of my soul

Within the child lies the fate of the future.

I am the first to admit I have made a couple of mistakes: two trips to rehab, Rudebox, the album, Geri Halliwell. I should have gone for Victoria, really, shouldn't I? I'd have been really famous.

When typhus or cholera breaks out, they tell us that Nobody is to blame. That terrible Nobody! How much he has to answer for. More mischief is done by Nobody than by all the world besides.