Quotes from Vanessa Redgrave

I don't think my life has been badly lived - but I don't think of it that way. And nor should I.

Integrity is so perishable in the summer months of success.

We are child-bearers primarily, and we are the weaker sex, and once we've given birth to our children, our life is by necessity bound to them. I wouldn't advocate it any other way.

People talk about preaching to the converted, which is total codswallop rubbish. There is no such thing as being converted forever - absolutely no such thing.

Politics is about divisions. Wherever you come in on the subject, there are divisions.

The arts stop society going rotten and mad.

I acted with Albie at Stratford-on-Avon in the 1959 season. We in the acting company tended to hang out at the pub known as the Dirty Duck.

Theater and poetry were what helped people stay alive and want to go on living.

A theater is being given over to market forces, which means that a whole generation that should be able to do theater as well as see it is being completely deprived.

Ask the right questions if you're to find the right answers.

Shakespeare lets us see real people undergoing real processes, with real feelings.

A film can open hearts and minds that have been closed, for whatever reasons.

I didn't plan that there'd be this awful situation in which our European governments, just to start the story off, breaking the Geneva conventions on the protection on the human rights of refugees.

I've identified all my life with refugees.

The stories of the first refugees that I ever came across in literature - that lots of people ever came across - were in 'The Iliad': the escape of Aeneas with his father on his back, the Trojans, from their burning city, and the defeat of their kingdom and what they had to do to try and find safety.

I think everybody, including myself, are in danger of losing our humanity.

I've still got to do something to help, however tiny it is. I always think of the old Hebrew saying, which is translated roughly into, 'He who saves one life saves the world,' because it's pretty ghastly to think of all the people we're not saving.

A deeper truth the camera can see can be more surprising than even the director imagined it could be. That's a wonderful thing that grows and happens in films.

I've been working for refugees for years and years and years.

The society Shakespeare knew was heading for tremendous change, and he seems to have recognized that and written about it in a coded way. I understand those codes, I think.

I thought my story, my experiences as a 2-year-old 'evacuee' from London at the outset of the war, could be important. What happened to me as a child was very light compared to what happened to many children, but... in Britain, there are so many people who just don't know our history.

I liked film-making, but the most difficult thing was the editing. I found it tormentingly difficult.

I don't want to spend my last few whatever it is, months or years on this earth, giving speeches.

My uncles and my father were all in the Royal Navy. One of my uncles, as a matter of fact, was drowned in the Sea of Singapore, having been fighting for the Royal Navy behind enemy lines, Japanese lines, in the hinterland of Singapore.