As an artist, you're always trying to reach a new height, do something new, try something you haven't done before, and push your boundaries.

The beauty of every experience you have is that hopefully you'll learn something from it.

As an actor, most of the time, you only have so much say in how, what and where things go. As a director, you really get to paint a bigger picture. You have many more brushes to use.

I'm not a trained chef, so I end up making stuff up. It either turns out brilliant or an absolute disaster. I just go for it.

One of the greatest things I've learned, as an actor, was how to talk to actors.

I believe in my own abilities and my future enough that I will not take a job that could hurt the integrity of my long-term career.

I already love acting and I love actors, so being able to communicate with actors and to bring performances out of them, and to tell a story and aid them, is really exciting for me.

If you felt like you've done the best thing you could possibly ever do, it's probably time to hang up your spurs because there's not much else to do.

A lot of why we become actors is to fill a void that we have and a part of that void is to live out and tell stories that we've lived or that we hope would have been different in our own lives.

At a certain level, great actors who are successful actors don't have to worry about it. They can just go for it because they believe in themselves.

As an actor, I've always paid attention on sets. I've always watched, learned and listened, and you start to see things differently. You always leave yourself an out.

Just because you're beautiful and perfect, it's made you conceited.

Pursuit of passion, dream of dreamers!

Remember: There's a reason the fairy godmother gave Cinderella two glass slippers.

In my early 30s, I started to realise I was avoiding something on a personal level, but also as a writer. I was in denial about who I was, and was trying to be someone who I was not.

I'm always learning from experiences because each one is different and there are different players involved in the project at the time with their own way of doing things

I guess Im attracted and repelled by isolation. It scares me. And its why I tend to write about older characters, too, because for them the stakes are somewhat higher.

She used to pride herself on her refusal to see two sides of an argument, but increasingly she accepts that issues are more ambiguous and complicated than she once thought.

I've been very fortunate and privileged as a player and manager - I've been successful and picked up a lot of knowledge and experience.

The less we move, the less we are capable of moving.

Life was very simple. My parents had come from the North of England, which is a fairly rugged, bleak, hard-working part of England, and so there was not the expectation of luxury.