Emma Thompson

“I place a high moral value on the way people behave. I find it repellent to have a lot, and to behave with anything other than courtesy in the old sense of the word-politeness of the heart,...”

“Can he love her? Can the soul really be satisfied with such polite affections? To love is to burn - to be on fire, like Juliet or Guinevere or Eloise...”

“Quick dinner with ... Ang [Lee] and his wife Jane who's visiting with the children for a while. We talked about her work as a microbiologist and the behaviour of the epithingalingie under th...”

“I think books are like people, in the sense that they'll turn up in your life when you most need them.”

“Hugh Laurie (playing Mr. Palmer) felt the line 'Don't palm all your abuses [of language upon me]' was possibly too rude. 'It's in the book,' I said. He didn't hit me.”

“If you don't want women to do whatever they need to do then you must provide them with food, you must provide them with shelter and their basic human rights.”

“Children are the most wonderful audiences. What's struck me most is that that they watch it so silently, until the end when they shriek and shout and clap.”

“We belabour, I think, under a very heavy crust of consumerism really.”

“It is remarkable how many misconceptions there are here about life in the developing world and I think that that knowledge gap has done a lot to contribute to the imbalance quite frankly.”

“The trouble is it's very difficult to pin-point the most important thing because Aids affects everyone in different levels of society, differently and you have to respond to it differently.”

“I do think that despite my best efforts to resist it, I am now a grown-up. It's due to lots of very difficult decisions that you make over a long period of time - about motherhood, wifehood,...”

“Sometimes I get to put on posh frocks and be Madam Glamour, the vendor of my wares. My lovely friend Kath, a stylist, puts me into things I'd never dream of. But my real life is very differe...”

“There is that thing about not working with animals and children - I don't think that's true. Although you should never work with donkeys.”

“I don't think people understand that being poor means you have to work from dawn until dusk just to survive through the day. I think there's some notion that poor people lie about all day no...”

“I have to write for everyone. What really fascinates me is how you make films or make stories that can genuinely be shared by different groups.”

“British aren't really known for their physical loveliness but firemen, generally speaking, are gorgeous.”

“I don't mean being famous is a perk, because one knows that it's not necessarily a perk, but there are certain perks to being well-known and respected in one's field. Public perks. Like, I d...”

“A lot of people in my world - in the acting world - have either lost friends to Aids or live with HIV because its origin in our culture, in New York for instance, was in the gay community.”

“I was brought up by very witty people who were dealing with quite difficult things: disease and death... I was brought up by people who tended to giggle at funerals.”

“If you've got to my age, you've probably had your heart broken many times. So it's not that difficult to unpack a bit of grief from some little corner of your heart and cry over it.”