Quotes from Joanna Lumley

I love a cardboard coffin. Both Mummy and Daddy went off in cardboard coffins, painted - Daddy's was rifle green. Beautifully made.

It's not often you get to hang out with someone you're really intrigued by. So when Will.i.am invited me to visit him at home, I couldn't resist.

The maddening thing is as actors of either sex, we get better as we get older, and so when you are 65, you think, 'I could play Juliet now. I understand it.'

I'm aware of my body.

I've been dealing with the press for 45 years. You need a very long spoon to sup with them. While you are always grateful, they are like badly trained dogs. They smile and wag and bite your arm off.

You see, there weren't these magazines like 'Heat' in my day. Always waiting to trip up these pretty girls and make them seem something horrible, something to make them look stupid and small and ugly and disgusting.

I quite often don't have breakfast, and I never have lunch. I find it helps not to wake my stomach up because if I had a good big breakfast, I would be ready for a snack at 11 and then a three-course lunch, then I'd be ready for tea, then a cocktail and then an enormous dinner.

I was involved with the landmines before the Princess of Wales, and nobody gave a damn about people losing their limbs. It only became a success when she came along.

I always knew that good stuff would come along when I was older. So when I was 18, I longed to be 30; when I was 30, I longed to be 50. I've always looked forward to my next birthday.

If the Gurkhas can't live in Britain, then I don't want to, either.

Way back in the 1970s, I was eating a steak, and I looked down, and for the first time it suddenly looked like flesh to me - like a dead creature. In a flash, I realized that every time I ate any kind of meat, something had been killed for me, and I stopped eating all animals, not just cows and pigs but chickens and fish.

I do not like bad photographs. I don't like to be badly lit. There is a fashion, particularly on stage, for very 'toppy' lighting, which makes a child look 50. Ten o'clock is very good. If someone is taking a picture, you say, 'Lamps at 10 o'clock,' then everybody looks lovely.

I've got lots of good friends. I could have affairs. I can read a book all night, put the cat on the end of the bed. I can pick up my passport and go to France. I don't have to ask anybody.

I think we could jam a bit more in our coffins than we do. I'm going to have some books, some I haven't finished or haven't read, some feathers and nice bits and pieces, the odd note. Just on the journey for the next bit.

I never go to the gym - I can't be doing with it. But I run up and down the stairs, wash my feet in the basin to keep supple, and I don't eat things that have a pulse.

Even clingfilm - if it's gone over a salad bowl, take it off, use it again. I wash out carrier bags; I save brown paper from parcels. I save string; I save ribbons. I separate all my bits and pieces.

Romance is quite an overblown word. This idea of chocolates and champagne and that's it. There's more to love than that. Romance is quite a soppy word. Love is much more important.

In Kenya you've got the great birds and monkeys leaping through the trees overhead. It's a chance to remember what the world is really like.

I switch off lights like a maniac. I drive at reasonable speeds so that I don't waste petrol.

I cut my hair myself and colour it. I know everybody in the hairdressing business despairs of me, but it's so much easier to do it yourself.

A lot of us are ruled by fear during our lives - afraid we'll get burgled, afraid a dog will bite us, afraid we'll get fat, afraid someone will leave us. Once you lose fear, life becomes sweeter, and that happens as you get older. I'm sure by the time I'm 80, I'll be able to do absolutely anything!

I used to go out wearing any old rubbish, no make-up, nothing, but since mobile phones, that has all had to stop. People do come up to you so often and say hello, or want a photograph, and I just can't do it anymore in what I used to wear. They don't want to be seen hanging off a rabid old granny any more than I do.

I admire politicians. It is a really tough assignment, and I would fall at the first fence.

I've never felt the constraints of social acceptability.