Even when I became the typical shy adolescent, I never minded performing. I felt there was a kind of safety, a protection about being on stage, about losing myself in another character.

I'm a lazy creature when I'm not acting.

Roses are my favourite flower, and my mum always grew a lot of them.

I have a horror of being in confined spaces. Potholing is my idea of hell.

My best feature is my hair.

If ever I feel I might be able to tackle it, I'd love to try holding a spear or something in the theater, or opening a door, or anything, just to try it, you know, because it must be some marvelous magic thing.

I like solitary pursuits, such as reading or pottering about in the garden.

Wherever I am in the world, I never get Sunday night blues. I suppose it's because I've never worked at any one thing long enough to start hating it.

Do I think I'm under-educated? Academically, absolutely. I never took any exams, no O- or A-levels.

When you start acting as a child, you grow up ahead of your movies.

The only way for errors to occur in a program is by being put there by the author. No other mechanisms are known. Programs can't acquire bugs by sitting around with other buggy programs. Right practice aims at preventing insertion of errors and, failing that, removing them before testing or any other running of the program.

My sons are precious to me and I have tried incredibly hard to strike the right balance between work and home life while being acutely aware that I haven't always got it right.

I admire tremendously those people who work consistently at the same jobs.

I cry in movies a lot, and over books.

In my life, things have happened to me. I've never felt I was controlling anything.