English Quotes

I remember stealing some pic n' mix when I was seven; when I got out of the shop, I burst into tears.

I love when people become obsessed with 'Downton.'

I like to accessorise shirts with a little ribbon tied round my collar or a country style ascot. I've also sewed little hearts on some of my sleeves which I've done for years because I always wear my heart on my sleeve so if you see a little embroidered heart on my clothes, that's why!

I just really think every job I do, I get this gypsy attitude to money.

I have endless playlists on my iPod so will throw on, say, Bruce Springsteen or The Smiths, depending on what kind of day I'm going to have.

I filmed 'Albatross' before I got 'Downton.' It's a coming-of-age movie about this girl who leaps into this family's life, like a whirlwind. She's ballsy and brash and wonderful, it was such an amazing character to play.

I don't mind giving everyone a shock - including myself.

I don't know if I'm so righteous.

I do so many things. Like when I was younger, if I drove past a house that I didn't want to live in, I'd hold my breath. Driving around somewhere like Slough I'd go blue in the face.

I am a hopeless romantic.

I absolutely adore Alessandra Rich, I think her dresses are stunning and she really knows how to cut and dress the female shape. Her stuff is really beautiful, stylish and a little bit quirky. I love it all!

Girls in scripts are often pretty but brainless, or geeky and no one likes them, so it's great to find richer roles. Chalk and cheese aspects of people are very interesting to play.

Everything you listen to when you are 17 should be embarrassing, otherwise you are way too cool.

Ever since I was young, I've read Austen and the Brontes. My friends laugh, but those books are always so tragic and wonderful - those stories, they're just incredible.

Before I go on stage, I knock three times. Three is my lucky number; I once went into an audition and was number 333 and got the best part ever.

At 17, we all think we know what we're doing.

If I was going to be broke I decided I might as well be with actors as anyone else. They were cheerful idiots and seemed to take it better.

When I do the music, I make the musicians listen to what's happening in the film. That way they treat the dialogue as if it was a singer.

There's nothing I've done which I'm ashamed of or I thought was actually bad.

Then I became interested in drama, and almost by accident, I drifted into film.

The power of sound to put an audience in a certain psychological state is vastly undervalued. And the more you know about music and harmony, the more you can do with that.

One of the things I love about cinema is the range.

Obviously, I try to make the films work for an audience. That's the main point of making a film, and in retrospect, one can see that certain films, let's say Leaving Las Vegas, demonstrated its own success.

It's difficult working with very rich actors, because inevitably they become a little spoilt, and the managers and agents tend to control things more than is healthy.

In discussing the process with the actors, I made it clear to them that they could improvise but that the sum total of their improvisation needed to impart certain plot points, and schematic material.

In a way, the history of jazz's development is a small mirror of classical music's development through the centuries. Now jazz is a living form of original music, while classical music has gotten to the end of its cycle in terms of exploring its form.

I've spent my life hearing people trying to apologize for music.

I've held onto little musical sketches that I thought could be useful, and the more time that I spend doing them for each film, then the more I have to draw on.

I'm a huge fan of world cinema, because each country uses cinema in a very individual way.

I would certainly say that films like Time Code and the Loss of Sexual Innocence were far more rewarding to me in terms of being able to move forward as a filmmaker.