Emma Thompson

It’s about time a 55-year-old British woman is the heroine of an action movie. I may have to write it.

If you've got to my age, you've probably had your heart broken many times. So it's not that difficult to unpack a bit of grief from some little corner of your heart and cry over it.

Sometimes I get to put on posh frocks and be Madam Glamour, the vendor of my wares. My lovely friend Kath, a stylist, puts me into things I'd never dream of. But my real life is very different. It's very, very home-based - an intense domestic life, that's the core of everything.

Just write. It doesn't matter what you write. Just sit at your desk and write.

I think books are like people, in the sense that they'll turn up in your life when you most need them.

Can he love her? Can the soul really be satisfied with such polite affections? To love is to burn - to be on fire, like Juliet or Guinevere or Eloise.

We've got people looking at our seamy side and our sad side a lot of the time because that's easier. It's much more difficult to make a film about happiness with lots of jokes in it.

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.

Children are the most wonderful audiences. What's struck me most is that that they watch it so silently, until the end when they shriek and shout and clap.

Constantly worrying about your reflection and criticizing your body, shape and size is an act of violence against yourself.

The trick is to age honestly and gracefully and make it look great, so that everyone looks forward to it.

My appearance has changed a lot over the years, but it has far more to do with how I feel about being a woman.

Maybe I don't take myself so seriously any more. And I don't care how I'm judged. I'm past all that.

Children don't need much advice but they really do need to be listened to and not just with half an ear.

Laughter is a celebration of our failings. That's what clowns are for. And that's what I am.

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.

The films I've made for children have been my hardest work, my best, because kids deserve the best.

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

I was brought up by very witty people who were dealing with quite difficult things: disease and death... I was brought up by people who tended to giggle at funerals.

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

We have to reinvest, I think, in the idea of articulacy as a form of personal human freedom and power.