Quotes from Emma Thompson

During an election, it's like they're doing my job: they're going around banging the drum for their party and selling their movie. You know, it's the same thing.

Film is so much to do with perfection and how differently you can feel about someone at the beginning of the film and the end of the film.

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, and work, and all the things that one has to make decisions about.

It's not my fault that there is this gap between rich and poor, it is the fault of governments. I want a different world. One where I don't wake up thinking I'm so lucky to be able to feed my daughter.

One is a child when one has a child. No one says, 'You will never be the same again.' Which is the truth! And we're all supposed to be happy all the time. What is that about?

If you're actually allowing your creative part to control your writing rather than a more commercial instinct or motive, then you'll find that all sorts of interesting things will bubble up to the surface.

Once you're a mom, you've been split into two people. It's like Peter Pan and his shadow.

Got up this morning and could not find my glasses. Finally had to seek assistance. Kate [Winslet] found them inside a flower arrangement.

When husbands and fathers leave, their wives and daughters tend to value themselves less as a result.

My mother has never approved of high heels. As a result, I have never been able to walk in high heels - and they were all I ever wanted. So of course, my daughter has two pairs.

I have a nervous breakdown in the film and in one scene I get to stand at the top of the stairs waving an empty sherry bottle which is, of course, a typical scene from my daily life, so isn't much of a stretch.

Its unfortunate and I really wish I wouldn't have to say this, but I really like human beings who have suffered. They're kinder.

I have had lots of friends who've been affected by Aids and a very good friend of mine, Oscar Moore, died of Aids and I was with him in his last year quite a bit. And of course he was a man living in a very rich culture with a wealthy family who was able to afford health care.

And it's absolutely true that male sexual behaviour and female responses to male demands change a lot when they start communicating - and the levels of the communication that I've seen on the ground in very, very poor areas are so high and I think why don't we have that here?

I think the point about ActionAid is what it's asking people to do is engage with poor people in developing countries and understand what their lives are like and understand how the way we live our lives impacts on theirs.

Indeed - judicious, consistent parenting is a dream of mine. No judgements, learning space and listening carefully are my goals.

On period costume posture coaching:) We all stand about like parboiled spaghetti being straightened out.

Sense and Sensibility signs litter Devon -- arrows with S & S on. Whenever Ang [Lee] sees a B & B sign he thinks it's for another movie.

Difficult for actors to extemporise in nineteenth-century English. Except for Robert Hardy and Elizabeth Spriggs, who speak that way anyway.

The fire alarm went off. Fire engines came racing; we all rushed out on the gravel drive, everyone thinking it was us. In fact, one of the elderly residents of Saltram had left a pan on the oven in her flat. Apparently this happens all the time. The tenant in question is appearing as an extra -- playing one of the cooks.

Shooting Willoughby carrying Marianne up the path. ... Male strength -- the desire to be cradled again? ... I'd love someone to pick me up and carry me off. Frightening. Lindsay assures me I'd start to fidget after a while. She's such a comfort.

My godfather sad that story was abut taking the chaotic jigsaw of life, making it into a picture and putting a frame around it so that we could look at it, have control over it. Story and art are the humanizing elements of us.

Families are weird. You'd think that people who live and eat and sleep in the same place would always have a lot in common. But sometimes they don't have anything in common AT ALL. You can have a brother who really likes ballet and a sister who thinks it's girlie. You could probably have Darth Vader and Mickey Mouse in the same family; they're that weird.

The trouble with death is that there is no next. There is only what was and for that I am profoundly and heartbrokenly grateful.