I have done everything I can to make sure my daughter knows her father because you form your own identity by rebelling against your parents - but first you have to know them.

With a theatre audience there's always the additional sense of a sustained challenge of which I'm acutely aware and for which you need to have the tools ready - your voice, physicality, brain.

The only work I did for the next five years after splitting from Vincent was work I'd already lined up.

I had the conviction that lovemaking fools you. The overpowering emotions it induces make you think you're sharing the same feelings as the other person and that they're imagining the same as you.

A relationship requires a lot of work and commitment.

I came to Ireland 20 years ago as a student, hitch-hiking round for a week and staying in Dublin.

I look for people who're passionate, dedicated to the text, and in whom I trust completely.

It helped me when I decided that we're on this planet to learn to live together and get along.

On the stage, you alone hold the key, and on the night you have to trust that the director has inspired you enough to take the material and run with it.

Theatre is a sacred space for actors. You are responsible; you are in the driving-seat.

My father was absent and he was a hero to me.

that at a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what's happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate. That's the world's greatest lie.

Such a mysterious business, motherhood. How brave a woman must be to embark on it.

Beauty begins the moment you decide to be yourself.

The loftiest in status are those who do not know their own status, and the most virtuous of them are those who do not know their own virtue.

The wolf on the hill is not as hungry as the wolf climbing the hill.

Life can be beautiful when you understand the inconvenience of being born.

If you ever meet someone who cannot understand why solitary confinement is considered punishment, you have met a misanthrope.

I shall be a good politician. Even if it kills me. Or if it kills anyone else, for that matter.

Why is it suddenly uncool to spell? That's all I want to know.

At college, and perhaps for a year afterwards, they had believed in literature, had believed in Beauty and in personal expression as an absolute end. When they lost this belief, they lost everything.