Top 474 Best Quotes

Anne Boleyn isn't a sympathetic character, but I like that she isn't a people pleaser. She's ambitious and manipulative, but she's honest. I'm biased, but I don't think a woman who has said 'no' to the King of England for six years would jump into bed with four of his best friends. She was a slick political mind.

The best thing going for us is Al Gore. I cannot conceive how the American people could elect him. On the other hand, I couldn't conceive how they could elect a Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton - especially Clinton in '96.

When I was younger, I was nervous and didn't have a huge amount of confidence as an actor. Comedy is something - you know when you're getting it right because you can hear. And you can hear if you're not getting it right! I like to create interesting, weird characters, and they're often best in comedies.

I talked my parents into sending me to Roedean at 16. I had this idea that if I could get into Cambridge, then I could join Footlights. My problem was that I went to a comprehensive in Brighton. I thought I'd have to start from a good school, and the best I could think of was Roedean.

What I responded to, on the page, was the way a poem could liberate, by means of a word's setting, through subtleties of timing, of pacing, that word's full and surprising range of meaning. It seemed to me that simple language best suited this enterprise.

Crime fiction makes money. It may be harder for writers to get published, but crime is doing better than most of what we like to call CanLit. It's elementary, plot-driven, character-rich story-telling at its best.