I was a hard worker, and I always knew my lines.

Once, the parental bed collapsed because all the children sat on it at once.

Blank House was exactly a nice empty sheet where nothing was accountable because you were so naughty that you were in Blank House.

If you were in the film industry at that time, you were always picked up by directors who were much older. You were whisked about and shown things. I did work very hard though.

I had a quick ear and could pick up languages.

I don't think in my family anyone looked after anyone. It didn't matter how old they were.

If there was a distraction I'd get up and jump out the window. I was quite out of hand. In schools like that I don't think they expect that girls are going to behave in such an outrageous fashion.

I was a hard worker, and I always knew my lines.

Suddenly I had a contract and I was earning lots of money.

Both my parents were doctors, and my mother had her surgery in the house. There were six children.

The most surprising thing for my mother and father was when I was actually earning more money than them by the time I was about 18. They thought I was going to be the ne'er do well, who they'd have to keep worrying about.

Very quickly, without really looking back or trying, I was just suddenly lifted into another sphere.

The best part of learning any profession, when you're really going through those huge stretching escalated times of learning and energy, is when you want to do it so much.

My father said, If you want to do acting, you have to be successful, which is a silly thing to say.

I had a place in England and was commuting from England to Australia, which is pretty stupid, but after two years I sort of knew what I wanted to do, more or less.

I never used to sleep much. I think we all go through a bit of a time like that where we rage about. If we don't, I don't think you've ever really lived.

You never came home for lunch: you just stayed doing, playing, having fun, surfing, running round.

I didn't know what to do with myself. I wasn't excited by the teaching of the school. If they'd been intent on really teaching you things, I would have been a little more attentive.

I sort of was good at writing essays. I was never very good at mathematics, and I was never very good at algebra. I loved science, but I wasn't sure of it.

I was often very, incredibly naughty, and if I didn't come home at tea time I used to be sent to bed without any dinner. But people used to bring me things: I was better fed in bed.

I got through my teen years by being a bit of a clown.

I learnt the theory of movement, which I still teach sometimes. I was very, very ambitious to learn a skill.

I spoke French a bit, and I could speak a bit of this and that, and when you were taught those things by people who couldn't really do it, you can do some pretty wonderfully, imaginative horrific things to teachers.

At boarding school you had to wear your name across your chest and your back, and obviously I had a pretty funny name. It wasn't Brown or Smith or Hughes.

When I did Taming of the Shrew, I was very tired, and I decided to have a holiday and make a documentary.

My mother felt it was time that I had some parental control, so I went off to America and went to New York.

If you've got a lot of children, I think you let the other children bring them up more and you just sort of step in and do stuff like every now and again.

It was a very odd household, because the grandmothers were so different. Both of them had their own pianos. So it would be duelling pianos by grandmothers.

If God had wanted me otherwise, He would have created me otherwise.

I don't care what your politics are, I would wager that if you asked any American woman which administration would she have most liked to work for as social secretary, she would pick Jacqueline Kennedy's White House as the place to be.

I didn't change the world.

War is regarded as nothing but the continuation of state policy with other means.

One has to confront history honestly.

A comedy isnt about being funny a comedy is about characters who dare to know that they may choose a happy ending after all.

Fantasy allows you bend the world and the situation to more clearly focus on the moral aspects of what's happening. In fantasy you can distill life down to the essence of your story.

What you aspire to on a sitcom is the feeling of live comedy.

When I was a kid I didn't know what I wanted to be when I grew up, but I did know what I didn't want to do. I didn't want to grow up, have 2.2 kids, get married, the whole white picket fence thing.

Man is a useless passion. It is meaningless that we live and it is meaningless that we die.

People need realness, reality. People can sense when someone is being pretentious or fake. It's because you feel it; you see it in someone's body language.

Beware of jokes from which we go away hollow and ashamed.

When I first starting conceiving series like 'Courtney,' 'Polly,' 'How Loathsome,' etc., I was shooting for closed story-arcs but open-ended concepts. Then I started realizing I was committing myself to potentially endless series.

It doesn't matter where you are coming from. All that matters is where you are going.

Memories have to be our most painful blessing.

Skills vary with the man. We must tread a straight path and strive by that which is born in us.

Marriage can be tricky and challenging at times.

Building art is a synthesis of life in materialised form. We should try to bring in under the same hat not a splintered way of thinking, but all in harmony together.

Look, Israel doesn't intend to introduce nuclear weapons, but if people are afraid that we have them, why not? It's a deterrent.

I do try and wear stuff by unknown designers, and I make sure I pay because if nothing else I have money.

American high school culture was impenetrable to me, and very cliquey: you had the Hispanics, the African Americans, the surfer guys and the goths and the immigrants. The jocks and the surfers got the girls. By the time I'd got to grips with it, I'd graduated.