Quotes

I've experienced love and ambition and desire in my life, but never in the same way as in a family.

A career for me is something like building a bridge. You know, where to put the lifts. You have a plan. I have a blueprint for each film, but not for my life.

The idea of a private life has been eroded in the sphere of politics.

I've spent my whole life fighting for leftwing causes, so I can tell you, no one is more surprised than me to be standing as candidate for Nigel Farage's Brexit party.

For me, normal means freedom to live life as we choose, from cramming into packed planes to go on holiday to crowding into pubs for birthday parties.

You don't need to be a fan of wars or militarism to note that heroic action - whether being prepared to be jailed as a conscientious objector or putting your life on the line by joining the resistance - creates a sense of meaning when society faces a huge challenge.

Retreating to indefinite lockdown culture would mean surrendering what makes life worth living, a far more tragic cost than anything inflicted by a virus.

Left to their own devices, the Tories will squash the life out of what Brexit really represents in terms of the chance to shake up political life and overturn a complacent status quo. We cannot let that happen.

I feel very lucky to have had the opportunity to bring Peter Morgan's Princess Elizabeth to life; she is a gift of a role and a challenge I am so grateful for - a young woman trying to navigate a path through an extraordinary situation.

I wouldn't have been able to go to drama school when I was 19. I don't think I was even conscious of life... I was like a zombie. But when I finished uni' I just realised... just go and do it, stop being a knob.

Being really likeable all the time is just not real life, so it's your duty to make a well-rounded character.

When someone is 90, and you've seen their entire life, you just think you know everything about them and that they must live a straight-laced life.

As an Englishwoman, you pick up a lot through osmosis. I've been watching the Queen all my life. But, yes, I did watch news footage and was able to pick a couple of little tics. For instance, she plays with her hands a lot and has a certain way of holding them on her lap when she's in public.

One of the greatest gifts in life is giving time and giving love. It helps me to stay grateful and happy.

Somehow in the public sector, if you start in the mailroom and spend your life getting promoted, it's unseemly.

Rushing around can be a pointless diversion from actually living your life.

For those of us whose thoughts digress; for whom unexpected juxtapositions are exhilarating rather than tiresome; who aim, if always inadequately, to convey life's experience in some semblance of its complexity - for such writers, the semi-colon is invaluable.

The effort to create a work of art that is true and potentially lasting, that is the very best work of art you can create at that point in your life - a book that may only reach or move a few people but will seem to those people somehow transformative. That's the ideal; that's always the motivation.

My mother turned 40 in 1973. So in 1970 - when 'The Female Eunuch' came out and Ms. magazine was founded - my mom was 37 with two children, and she was just that little bit too old, and the circumstances of her life were set up in a certain way that for her to fulfill her ambitions and dreams, she would have had to break with the family.

I feel as though there are things that I'm trying to do - you know, capturing truthfully some aspect of human experience - and I'm trying really hard not to be fake. And in writing, as in life, it's harder than you think.

I still believe on some level that at the end, somebody will say, 'You get an A-minus for your life.' And it's not true. It's not true.

If you live in a family or have five roommates, there's some sort of reality check, but when you live alone, there's a lot more leeway for your fantasy life to be more and more a part of your everyday life.

In midlife, I feel that my tendency to acquire books is rather like someone smoking two packs a day: it's a terrible vice that I wish I could shuck.

I went around in my teens and early 20s thinking that life was a con trick. I had managed to grow up believing in all sorts of romantic ideas about hard work and justice and truth, and it seemed the real world was much more complicated and shaded than I wanted to believe.

We read to find life, in all its possibilities.