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…
I think books are like people, in the sense that they’ll turn up in your life when you most need them.
Hugh Laurie (playing Mr. Palmer) felt the line ‘Don’t palm all your abuses [of language upon me]’ was possibly too rude. ‘It’s in the book,’ I said. He didn’t hit me.
I don’t have technique because I never learnt any.
Lindsay [Doran] goes round the table and introduces everyone — making it clear that I am present in the capacity of writer rather than actress, therefore no one has to be too nice to me.
Difficult for actors to extemporise in nineteenth-century English. Except for Robert Hardy and Elizabeth Spriggs, who speak that way anyway.
My godfather sad that story was abut taking the chaotic jigsaw of life, making it into a picture and putting a frame around it so that we could look at it, have control over it. Story and art are the humanizing elements of us.
I ask Laurie if it’s possible to get trained fish. Lindsay says this is how we know I’ve never produced a movie.
Kissing Hugh was lovely. Glad I invented it. Can’t rely on Austen for a snog, that’s for sure.
Paparazzi arrived for Hugh [Grant]. We had to stand under a tree and smile for them.Photographer: ‘Hugh, could you look less — um –‘Hugh: ‘Pained?
Jane reminds us that God is in his heaven, the monarch on his throne and the pelvis firmly beneath the ribcage. Apparently rock and roll liberated the pelvis and it hasn’t been the same since.
(On period costume posture coaching:)”We all stand about like parboiled spaghetti being straightened out.
Shooting Willoughby carrying Marianne up the path. They did it four times. ‘Faster,’ said Ang [Lee]. They do it twice more. ‘Don’t pant so much,’ said Ang. Greg [Wise (playing Willoughby)], to his great credit, didn’t scream.
I place a high moral value on the way people behave. I find it repellent to have a lot and to behave with anything other than courtesy in the old sense of the word-politeness of the heart a gentleness of the spirit.
Indeed – judicious, consistent parenting is a dream of mine. No judgements, learning space and listening carefully are my goals.
Any problem, big or small, within a family, always seems to start with bad communication. Someone isn’t listening.
We need men and women to sit down and talk to each other about sex honestly and openly. That would help us fight Aids so immediately. But our lack of communication is hugely problematic.
I’ve a problem with the word charity because I think that NGOs, as I prefer calling them, really do take the work of moral and social responsibilities that ought to be taken on by governments.
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.
It is remarkable how many misconceptions there are here about life in the developing world and I think that that knowledge gap has done a lot to contribute to the imbalance quite frankly.
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.