Proving yourself in a field where the casualty rate is so notoriously high is an ongoing challenge.

Never give up. You only get one life. Go for it!

I place an enormous premium on loyalty. If someone betrays me, I can forgive them rationally, but emotionally I have found it impossible to do so.

Anthony Hopkins says you just keep acting. Do it all the time and eventually it will happen. He got his break, after all, by taking a role nobody else wanted. A cannibal!

I have been incredibly privileged with my roles - after all I have had the chance to do some fantastic fun acting such as the Spice Girls Movie - who can ever forget that!

Always have an answer - even if you change your mind five minutes later.

You finish a movie and you think, there, you've done it, really well, or best you can. But if you watch it, you see it was just bollocks.

If you're doing well, you're a target, nobody's interested in you except how you can be of use to them.

Time and time again I was told that I would never make the film on time and never make it on budget. That kind of criticism tends to turn me into a great big motor of efficiency.

I loved being asked 2,000 questions a day, storyboarding every move, knowing as though by instinct exactly where the camera had to be, because it was my story.

I am a very judgmental person. Of myself and other people. I recognise it's a great fault, but I have no power over that.

If I think God’s aim is to produce rule-followers, spiritual growth will always be an obligation rather than a desire of my heart.

However beautiful a morning may be, we still must not wish it to continue endlessly, because this shall mean missing forever all the beauties of the night!

If youth were not ignorant and timid, civilization would be impossible.

And any stone being mentally handled must become endowed with such poetry and artistry as God has given you.

God oft hath a great share in a little house.

Mostly the thought and the verse come inseparably. In my poem Poetics, it's as close as I come to telling how I do it.

If you are unable to compete with the pious in their good deeds, compete with the sinful in their repentance.

Unless there is meaning, there is no solution.

"That we're dysfunctional and toxic!""We were dysfunctional and toxic," I correct her.

I have never found, in anything outside of the four walls of my study, an enjoyment equal to sitting at my writing desk with a clean page, a new theme, and a mind awake.