Shyness is just egoism out of its depth.

I think I'm a better actress for having friends and interests outside the theatre. I wouldn't want to live my life surrounded by other actors all the time.

I plant a lot of trees. I am a great believer in planting things for future generations. I loathe the now culture where you just live for today.

Shyness is just egoism out of its depth.

The character I play in Star Quality says acting is the be-all and end-all of her life. I'm not like that. I do enjoy working and I give every job my best shot but I never feel, What on Earth am I going to do now?

We always had chocolates and my mother was careful to make sure they were unwrapped in advance so the paper wouldn't rustle in the middle of a performance.

A lot of people have it - that fantasy of being lord or lady of the manor, either in the present or at some time in history.

Everyone wants instant everything, and they want instant success, but I always think you should treat things in the arts like a garden, and let them grow.

I always used to say when I was on television that I prefer to be on stage and when on stage I prefer to do television. Typical human condition.

I don't believe in public humiliation. It went out with the stocks.

I don't feel 'vibes' when I enter a building - don't feel the previous owners looking down on me. But I do know when a place feels friendly.

I don't think actors ever retire, they just stop being asked to work.

I love touring, I really do.

I think it is very sad that 'sitcom' has become a pejorative term.

I'm a bit of a Scotophile. I have a house on the Black Isle, so I'm in Scotland quite a lot and think Edinburgh is just the most beautiful city.

I'm a realist.

I'm not against accents - my husband's from Lancashire and has a rural Lancs accent. We've just got back from Scotland yesterday, and I love that Highland burr.

I'm sure that is a reason why young people occasionally bash up old people - because the ages don't mix any more.

In my book, all manners are is thinking of somebody else.

In this great age of communication, there a lot of people you can't actually understand. I know everyone tweets, and twits and texts and all that, but actually we've all got voices, and it is awfully nice to hear them and if you can understand what people are saying.

Language is my bugbear. Everyone says things now like 'I was sat' instead of 'I was sitting', which just sounds so ugly.

Older people, who just happen to have been around longer, may not be cleverer than the young, but they have seen more.

So often actors only mix with actors, which is quite incestuous, and doesn't give them the insight into how other people work.

We have this wonderful language and we don't appreciate it. That's old-fashioned me, but when I went to school, everyone had elocution lessons, not to sound posh but so you could be understood.

With a play, you do it and it's gone. Films always date. Television drama always dates. Television comedy, for some reason, seems to go on.

Young people don't want to sit at home and watch television; they'd sooner be out doing their own thing.

Many a man is praised for his reserve and so-called shyness when he is simply too proud to risk making a fool of himself.

I think we all have blocks between us and the best version of ourselves, whether it's shyness, insecurity, anxiety, whether it's a physical block, and the story of a person overcoming that block to their best self. It's truly inspiring because I think all of us are engaged in that every day.

I think I had a shyness about me, I think I discovered acting as a way to break out of that and as a way of belonging, a sense of being special.

You know what my greatest personal stumbling block is? My shyness.

I started studying shyness in adults in 1972. Shyness operates at so many different levels. Out of that research came the Stanford shyness clinic in 1977.

Shyness is just egoism out of its depth.

Shyness has a strange element of narcissism, a belief that how we look, how we perform, is truly important to other people.

The level of shyness has gone up dramatically in the last decade. I think shyness is an index of social pathology rather than a pathology of the individual.

I genuinely enjoy talking one-to-one. I have no shyness about that.

What troubles me is the Internet and the electronic technology revolution. Shyness is fueled in part by so many people spending huge amounts of time alone, isolated on e-mail, in chat rooms, which reduces their face-to-face contact with other people.

I was passionate. I found something that I loved. I could be all alone in a big old skating rink and nobody could get near me and I didn't have to talk to anybody because of my shyness. It was great. I was in my fantasy world.

What I never overcame is a kind of shyness.

In talking, shyness and timidity distort the very meaning of my words. I don't pretend to know anybody well. People are like shadows to me and I am like a shadow.

Scientists have found the gene for shyness. They would have found it years ago, but it was hiding behind a couple of other genes.

There is a shyness about me, and I really need to get out more.

I've gotten better at not making people feel uncomfortable with my shyness.

Learning has always been made much of, but forgetting has always been deprecated; therefore pedantry has pretty well established itself throughout the modern world at the expense of culture.

It does you no good to see the number two or number three man in the corporation-you have to get through to number one.

Dreams are not without meaning wherever thay may come from-from fantasy, from the elements, or from other inspiration.

Occasionally I'll be a producer for hire on a larger budget movie, but with Blumhouse Pictures, we mainly focus on micro-budget, under-$5-million-dollar movies. That's what we're in business to do, and that's what we're in business to make.

Scholars have long known that fishing eventually turns men into philosophers. Unfortunately, it is almost impossible to buy decent tackle on a philosopher's salary.

I made a tin man costume with tin foil and furnace parts because I thought it would help me be more heartless.

I'm very moved by chaos theory, and that sense of energy. That quantum physics. We don't really, in Hindu tradition, have a father figure of a God. It's about cosmic energy, a little spark of which is inside every individual as the soul.