"Women's courage is rather different from men's. The fact that women have to bring up children and look after husbands makes them braver at facing long-term issues, such as illness. Men are more immediately courageous. Lots of people are brave in battle."

"Each marriage has to be judged separately, and we never know what's going on in another person's marriage."

"I was sent to a finishing school, which didn't last long when mother found out how badly chaperoned we were. Then I 'came out' before going to a domestic science school."

"People try much less hard to make a marriage work than they used to fifty years ago. Divorce is easier."

"To imagine is everything, to know is nothing at all."

"Don Quixote's misfortune is not his imagination, but Sancho Panza."

"I studied Hitchcock a little bit at University and knew the famous story about the Birds - that he'd tortured Tippi for a day using real birds. I had no idea that it was a five-day onslaught and that it was the tip of an iceberg that carried on through to another film."

"The way that a handful of corporations in Los Angeles dictate how our stories are told creates a real poverty of imagination and it's a big problem."