To watch King Lear is to approach the recognition that there is indeed no meaning in life, and that there are limits to human understanding.

The English can laugh and at the same time strike you down, without the least compunction. It is the secret of their success as a nation.

I just wanted to be an ordinary, middle-class person. When I was at Cambridge I made great efforts to lose the last remnants of my cockney accent.

There is no humiliation worse than the consciousness of a wasted life. It stains the spirit, forestalls hope, and destroys any motive for action or change.

You don't have to be brought up in a grand house to have a sense of the past, and I truly believe that there are certain people to whom or through whom the territory - the place, the past - speaks.

I don't believe necessarily the past is in the past. It's eternal, it's all around us.

Every book for me is a chapter in the long book which will finally be closed on the day of my death.

The endless chatter of this journey had wearied me.

Yes, I have inherited the past because I have acknowledged it at last? And, now that I have come to understand it, I no longer need to look back.

I believe that the gods themselves are frightened of the world which they have fashioned.

One can forgive Shakespeare anything, except one's own bad lines.

I would like the film to make people think about the place of women in the world - the advances and setbacks that they have experienced these past years in terms of their freedom.

Sympathy will have been increased through natural selection

It is the whole business of the whole church to preach the whole gospel to the whole world.

When you're born, you're pure. Unspoiled and trusting. Some say, it's the only time we're perfect. You're also born covered in blood and placenta. No one gets nostalgic about that.

Every stage of life has its troubles, and no man is content with his own age.

Sure, you make money writing on the coast ... but that money is like so much compressed snow. It goes so fast it melts in your hand.

I had never dreamt Id become an actress. It was destiny that put me in the right place at the right time and gave me the right opportunities.

If the people at the top think that reaching for a gun will solve the problem, why shouldn't the people at the bottom think the same?

Music has given a voice to many generations, and I think we, as artists, can be a part of creating a better world.

We need a tax system that essentially takes very good care of the people who just really aren't as well adapted to the market system but are nevertheless doing useful things in the society.