I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes, so live ...

I have always felt that a woman has the right to treat the subject of her age with ambiguity until, perhaps, she passes into the realm of over ninety. Then it is better she be candid with herself and with the world.

Anger is the most impotent of passions. It effects nothing it goes about, and hurts the one who is possessed by it more than the one against whom it is directed.

Nearly all the best things that came to me in life have been unexpected, unplanned by me.

We live in an age when to be young and to be indifferent can be no longer synonymous. We must prepare for the coming hour. The claims of the Future are represented by suffering millions and the Youth of a Nation are the trustees of Posterity.

This is the first age that's ever paid much attention to the future, which is a little ironic since we may not have one.

High expectations weren't nurtured in my neck of nowhere back then - children weren't fawned over from an early age as 'gifted' and groomed for a prizewinning future self-esteem was considered something you had to pick from the garden yourself.

A great source of calamity lies in regret and anticipation therefore a person is wise who thinks of the present alone, regardless of the past or future.

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.

So I won an Oscar. It's amazing. I've got that for the rest of my life for a performance I am proud of. It nearly killed me. I am really proud of the film. That's it, moving on.

The art of war is simple enough. Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike him as hard as you can, and keep moving on.

The world is a crazy, beautiful, ugly complicated place, and it keeps moving on from crisis to strangeness to beauty to weirdness to tragedy. The caravan keeps moving on, and the job of the longform writer or filmmaker or radio broadcaster is to stop - is to pause - and when the caravan goes away, that's when this stuff comes.