Emma Thompson Quotes

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...

~ Emma Thompson

Quick dinner with ... Ang [Lee] and his wife Jane who's visiting with the children for a while. We talked about her work as a microbiologist and the behaviour of the epithingalingie under the influence of cholesterol. She's fascinated by cholesterol. Says it's very beautiful: bright yellow. She says Ang is wholly uninterested. He has no idea what she does.I check this out for myself. 'What does Jane do?' I ask.'Science,' he says vaguely.

~ Emma Thompson

I think books are like people, in the sense that they'll turn up in your life when you most need them.

~ Emma Thompson

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.

~ Emma Thompson

Shooting Willoughby carrying Marianne up the path. ... Male strength -- the desire to be cradled again? ... I'd love someone to pick me up and carry me off. Frightening. Lindsay assures me I'd start to fidget after a while. She's such a comfort.

~ Emma Thompson

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.

~ Emma Thompson

Horror. I can't manage it. I become--well--horrified. Self-help books have a similar effect. When asked, Any literary genre you simply can't be bothered with? - (By the Book: Writers on Literature and the Literary Life from the NYT Book Review, by Pamela Paul)

~ Emma Thompson

Difficult for actors to extemporise in nineteenth-century English. Except for Robert Hardy and Elizabeth Spriggs, who speak that way anyway.

~ Emma Thompson

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.

~ Emma Thompson

I ask Laurie if it's possible to get trained fish. Lindsay says this is how we know I've never produced a movie.

~ Emma Thompson

The fire alarm went off. Fire engines came racing; we all rushed out on the gravel drive, everyone thinking it was us. In fact, one of the elderly residents of Saltram had left a pan on the oven in her flat. Apparently this happens all the time. The tenant in question is appearing as an extra -- playing one of the cooks.

~ Emma Thompson

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?

~ Emma Thompson

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.

~ Emma Thompson

I seem finally to have stopped worrying about Elinor, and age. She seems now to be perfectly normal -- about twenty-five, a witty control freak. I like her but I can see how she would drive you mad. She's just the sort of person you'd want to get drunk, just to make her giggling and silly.

~ Emma Thompson

We've hired the calmest babies in the world to play the hysterical Thomas. One did finally start to cry but stopped every time Chris [Newman (assistant director)] yelled 'Action'. ... Babies smiled all afternoon. Buddhist babies. They didn't cry once. We, however, were all in tears by 5 p.m.

~ Emma Thompson

(On period costume posture coaching:)We all stand about like parboiled spaghetti being straightened out.

~ Emma Thompson

Our first point of discussion is the hunt. (...) My idea is to start the film with an image of the vixen locked out of her lair which has been plugged up. Her terror as she's pursued across the country. This is a big deal. It means training a fox from birth or dressing up a dog to look like a fox. Or hiring David Attenbrorough, who probably knows a few foxes well enough to ask a favour.

~ Emma Thompson

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.

~ Emma Thompson

Indeed - judicious, consistent parenting is a dream of mine. No judgements, learning space and listening carefully are my goals.

~ Emma Thompson

Any problem, big or small, within a family, always seems to start with bad communication. Someone isn't listening.

~ Emma Thompson

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.

~ Emma Thompson

And it's absolutely true that male sexual behaviour and female responses to male demands change a lot when they start communicating - and the levels of the communication that I've seen on the ground in very, very poor areas are so high and I think why don't we have that here?

~ Emma Thompson

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.

~ Emma Thompson

I don't mean being famous is a perk, because one knows that it's not necessarily a perk, but there are certain perks to being well-known and respected in one's field. Public perks. Like, I don't know, general friendliness and willingness to please, just to point out two.

~ Emma Thompson

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.

~ Emma Thompson

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.

~ Emma Thompson

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.

~ Emma Thompson