Quotes from Romola Garai

I would love to live free of the fear and sadness and real desperation that I think the effect of childbirth has on women, especially because we are expected to be so concerned by 'recovery' from childbirth.

When I was a child, I always wanted to be funny and to please people in my family. As you grow up that instinct becomes more refined, but it's still there.

If I have to spend prolonged periods of time in a trailer, I go mad. Stuck in a metal box doing nothing, I lie there paralysed with boredom.

I'm fundamentally a busy person; I spend my time doing useful things and profoundly useless things!

The worst thing you can do as a performer is to judge your character in any way, positively or negatively.

I think one of the reasons I've done so much period work is because I feel so depressed by how society chooses to represent women in contemporary work.

There are people who you see on screen and think, 'Wow, that's a slim person,' and in the flesh they look nearly dead.

I love science fiction. I read a lot of science fiction.

I was mad until I was about 25. Completely out of control with my emotions. Everything that happened to me was a tragedy. I've been much happier over 25.

When you talk to women who were working as print journalists or in broadcasting in the '50s, and then you talk to women who were working in the late '60s, there's an enormous difference. There had already been a huge transition. Then, of course, you get well into the '70s and there were women with children working.

I have always been interested in gender politics, so I'm not that keen on doing things that don't represent a truth about women.

Writer/directors are, for me, the most inspiring people to work for because they are the person on set that knows the answer to all the questions. They have the most invested in the project because they've been with it from conception.

I try not to live in the future too much; that can make you crazy as an actor. There are so many people who are obsessed about their career path, like it's something which you can control, which fundamentally you can't.

I'd actually really love to review books and films and plays, but you can't be an artist and a critic. I would love it if I could.

I love '30 Rock.' Absolutely love it. It's a game-changing show.

I get grumpy about the innate conservatism of our tastes; I love bold theatre, and I get annoyed when a heritage piece is really successful.

If you are an actress in L.A., on your 40th birthday they should just hand you the keys to the lunatic asylum.

The language of freedom-fighting was so co-opted by the baby boomers in order to express their now-hopelessly compromised ideologies that no other generation could emulate it without a smirk. This has created an apathetic generation in the West, with young people no longer distinguishing between the old order and the new.

I read the paper pretty much every day, as well as getting news from the Internet and on TV. But I don't do social media at all; I'm a Luddite from that point of view.

There are American directors I'd really like to work with, but I don't know how much I want to be sitting in my house, doing the rounds of meetings with CEOs. You have to be really hardworking to do all that, and I'm lazy.

Increasingly, it's actresses doing the big fashion advertising campaigns, and now there's no distinction between actresses and models.

It's a sad fact that a lot of those countries who haven't been involved in the war in Iraq have taken far more responsibility for rehoming people displaced by the war than Britain has done.

I would like to know that I was still going to be employed as a woman well into my 60s. In acting terms, a career that spans a lifetime is a very hard thing to achieve, particularly as a woman.

I wouldn't want to direct - I think that's a very different job. You have to be a very specific type of person to do that.