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

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.

I know the history of the record business so well because I followed Billie Holiday into the record studios. It was so primitive compared to the sophisticated business today.

I listened to Billie Holiday a lot in order to learn to sing. She remains one of the extraordinary jazz singers. But my intent is to become my own voice, to be able to interpret these songs in my own way.

I just feel - specifically about that holiday - why is it just one day that you have to tell the person that you love how much you love them? I think that is a little silly. I am much more the girl that likes the spontaneous.

The second trial was a fair trial. I do not call it a second trial. I call it a fair trial, as opposed to the first trial, which was an unfair trial, a Roman holiday.

I can only say the first thing that pops into my mind is I remember, years ago, seeing kind of a has-been country singer working - when I first moved to Nashville - in a bar in a Holiday Inn.

I have the ability to sing with emotion and feeling, but if you say I sound like Billie Holiday, that's cool. Let's look at who Billie was: she was this person, this singer, this beautiful diva who could move the audience with the slightest gesture of her hand.

I like to compare the holiday season with the way a child listens to a favorite story. The pleasure is in the familiar way the story begins, the anticipation of familiar turns it takes, the familiar moments of suspense, and the familiar climax and ending.

There is no racial or ethnic involvement in Thanksgiving, and people who may be very distant from the Christian system can see the beauty and the positive spirit that comes from the holiday.

In our open society, we are inclined to give to the less fortunate for the pure goodness of giving. We open our home to those who are alone on this holiday to spread some warmth into the life of another.

I have been determined for the past couple of years to move away from all those Holiday programmes.

I've just finished my next collection, Possible Side Effects, and I'm now working on a collection of holiday stories as well as a memoir about my relationship with my father.

I have had a holiday, and I'd like to take it up professionally.

I knew there was something I had to do yesterday. I couldn't remember what it is. I can't figure it out. I know it's a holiday. I know I don't have a meeting. It's very confusing.

Who the hell wants fourteen pairs of shoes when they go on holiday? I haven't had fourteen pairs in my life.

A holiday is when you celebrate something that's all finished up, that happened a long time ago and now there's nothing left to celebrate but the dead.

When Billie Holiday sings a song, I hear the song, but I always hear her and her truth.

I love oldies just kind of sweet, slinky, Fifties music. The slow stuff. And Billie Holiday.

Once again, we come to the Holiday Season, a deeply religious time that each of us observes, in his own way, by going to the mall of his choice.

Billie Holiday I never met, but I love her music.

We usually use that mostly on the weekends because we have access to the range during the week. But I can tell you a number of times they have had a training holiday at Fort Benning, so nobody trains, and to drag him in is like pulling teeth.

I have been keeping myself fit. I am going on holiday next week in the Mediterranean so that I can really unwind after the football season and have a rest.