“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...”

“Shooting Willoughby carrying Marianne up the path. ... Male strength -- the desire to be cradled again? ... I'd love someone to pick me up and carry me off. Frightening. Lindsay assures me I'd star...”

“I don't have technique because I never learnt any.”

“Difficult for actors to extemporise in nineteenth-century English. Except for Robert Hardy and Elizabeth Spriggs, who speak that way anyway.”

“Quick dinner with ... Ang [Lee] and his wife Jane who's visiting with the children for a while. We talked about her work as a microbiologist and the behaviour of the epithingalingie under the influ...”

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

“Me plus you. (Imma tell you one time) Me plus you. (Imma tell you one time)Me plus you. (Imma tell you one time)One time. When I met ya girl my heart when knock (knock knock) Now them butterflies i...”

“We're actors we're the opposite of people!”

“I got married because I fell in love with this woman. I had a baby with her because we wanted to have children. But that's not because of some philosophical ideal at all, no.”

“But some characters in books are really real--Jane Austen's are; and I know those five Bennets at the opening of Pride and Prejudice, simply waiting to raven the young men at Netherfield Park, are ...”

“You take people, you put them on a journey, you give them peril, you find out who they really are.”

“A novel must show how the world truly is, how characters genuinely think, how events actually occur. A novel should somehow reveal the true source of our actions.”

“For a control freak, love and the desire to control others are synonymous. Once they lose control over the object of their desire, hostility takes over in full force.”