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

I took some classes in sign language when I was in my early teens because I was told that I would be completely deaf very early. But I never really wanted to learn.

But as far as my work is concerned, I see no impediment, and various advantages, to being deaf.

Nothing is going to improve my hearing. I've only got to prevent it from getting worse.

One of the reasons I wanted to teach deaf children was because it made me very sad that they spoke so clumsily and that they moved with less grace that I knew was possible of deaf people.

I can not remember even thinking that I was deaf when I was dancing.

I have to concentrate more intently when people speak. I always have to position myself on their right side so that I can hear out of my left ear. I sometimes get a crick in my neck from listening. But I don't there's too much else.

I'm the one by the backdoor - I am not the one in the middle of the party.

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

I think the deafness affects me more than I realise; I think it makes me more tired. I loathe parties. I attend, smile and leave.

I'm lucky that most of the time I'm on location in amazing places. Most of the time, I don't need holidays, I just stop working.

My worst holiday was in Athens when I was a young drama student at Rada in 1965. I ran out of money. I had my things stolen and I wasn't able to speak a word of the language.

We all live in fear of cancer, but to be told you have skin cancer was terrifying.

When I got into the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, a doctor told me to give up the course as I'd be totally deaf within a couple of years. But I refused to give in.

When I look in the mirror, I sometimes think I'm getting old, but then I have two generations behind me so that helps puts things into perspective. I am a grandmother now, but at least my nine-year-old grandson Jude calls me Glamma and not Granny.

When I was young I used to smother myself with olive oil mixed with a dash of vinegar to keep the flies away and lay in the sunshine for hours on end. But we knew no better then. Now we know how stupid that was.

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.

The difference between talking on your cell phone while driving and speaking with a passenger is huge. The person on the other end of the cell phone is chattering away, oblivious.

If we're talking about masculinity and tenderness, I don't look at Clinton.

I don't know where the stock market is going, but I will say this, that if it continues higher, this will do more to stimulate the economy than anything we've been talking about today or anything anybody else was talking about.

There's nothing worse than talking about yourself to find out that you're not that interesting.

Colonel Parker asked Henry and me to come to Elvis' suite and have breakfast. There were at least five policemen stationed up there. He was talking on the telephone.

I'll be helping them getting suited up, getting them in the airlock, getting the airlock prepared, and getting them out the hatch, and then talking them through these three spacewalks.

I don't see this planet being... they're talking about how they're turning around the environmental problems here, but I think it's already too late.

Over and over again, financial experts and wonkish talking heads endeavor to explain these mysterious, 'toxic' financial instruments to us lay folk. Over and over, they ignobly fail, because we all know that no one understands credit default obligations and derivatives, except perhaps Mr. Buffett and the computers who created them.

I don't know how much influence we really had, because we never put our pictures on the albums or anything and we never really promoted the Talking Heads connection, because we wanted to keep it separate from Talking Heads.

I do not believe that I have had an interview with anybody in twenty-five years in which the person to whom I was talking was not annoyed during the early part of the interview by my asking stupid questions.

I never took my SAT's. I never applied to college. I moved right out here and jumped into the thick of things. Whether that was the smart move or not, I'm sitting here talking to you now, so it paid off.

But let's be clear. We're talking about a country where there's no opposition. As leader he can ignore Parliament and - sorry that's Tony Blair isn't it? Um, so he doesn't even have to ask the country before he goes to war - sorry that's still Tony Blair.

It was impossible to get a conversation going, everybody was talking too much.

We need people out talking about the President, explaining, agreeing with and praising his actions.

I was on Oprah's show recently talking about the people who impacted me the most. One was a teacher and one was my soccer coach. I didn't even go into my family, who had the most influence.

I love talking about women because they are a constant study and you're always learning.

When people screamed novelty the first time around talking about an ugly video and stuff I was really insulted because, hold on a minute, everyone you see in the video are real life.