"I used to believe that anything was better than nothing. Now I know that sometimes nothing is better."
"I want to do a musical movie. Like Evita, but with good music."
"My money goes to my agent, then to my accountant and from him to the tax man."
"If I'm too strong for some people, that's their problem."
"I've always been ambitious to be very good at what I do."
"I told them I wouldn't sign a blank cheque."
"I have never believed you make your case stronger by bad-mouthing your opposition."
"It would be nice if education was free to everyone who wanted it, but that's not the world we live in."
"Acting is not about dressing up. Acting is about stripping bare. The whole essence of learning lines is to forget them so you can make them sound like you thought of them that instant."
"One hell of an outlay for a very small return, with most of them."
"You've got to sing like you don't need the money."
"I look forward to growing old and wise and audacious."
"Men can be a great deal of work for very little reward."
"Why put make-up on when you only have to take it off again?"
"When I have to cry, I think about my love life. When I have to laugh, I think about my love life."
"My job is to see the world through the character's eyes."
"Our job is to unleash the play. It's not just about your character or interaction with the other characters. There's an energy in all good plays which you have to find. And that is part and parcel of ensuring that an audience gets what it's about."
"I studiously avoid any academic dissections of the play and any kind of previous experience of playing. For me, it's all in the play."
"My mother kept all my awards on the sideboard of her front room, and she polished them. She polished everything religiously. And it doesn't take long for the very thin layer of gold to disappear and the base metal underneath to show through."
"I've always said the first duty of life is to live it, and I do believe that. And we delude ourselves if we think it's not going to end. How we individually meet that, I think, is entirely individual."
"It always amazed me - it still does - that people offer me work. And when the theater was my basic bread and butter, every time a show finished, I was convinced I would never work again."
"Usually, if there is a woman's part in a piece, there's only one, so you've got no other actresses to work with."
"The best theater is trying to tell the truth, and the best politics is trying to tell the truth."
"My fear with 'Lear' was that I would not have the physical or vocal strength. But this play, it's all in your head. That was one of the really interesting things when we were rehearsing it: We were all exhausted because it was all up here."
"If a woman is successful, then she's deemed to be the exception that proves the rule. If a woman fails, well, we're all failures. That kind of underlying approach to our gender doesn't seem to me to have changed an iota."
