Love is like a friendship caught on fire. In the beginning a flame very pretty often hot and fierce but still only light and flickering. As love grows older our hearts mature and our love becomes as coals deep-burning and unquenchable.

The sincere friends of this world are as ship lights in the stormiest of nights.

If it's very painful for you to criticize your friends - you're safe in doing it. But if you take the slightest pleasure in it that's the time to hold your tongue.

None of us had any idea of how successful Downton was going to be. I thought I was signing up for another period drama that had a slightly modern feel. It had a freedom about it because it was coming out of the head of Julian Fellowes. Anything could happen and generally did.

Freedom is just Chaos with better lighting.

That's why I like fast film. It gives you more freedom to light more naturally.

It is true you cannot eat freedom and you cannot power machinery with democracy. But then neither can political prisoners turn on the light in the cells of a dictatorship.

It is not the simple statement of facts that ushers in freedom it is the constant repetition of them that has this liberating effect. Tolerance is the result not of enlightenment but of boredom.

I felt extremely uncomfortable as the focal point in the spotlight. I really like the behind the scenes role because all my freedom is there.

I was interested by the idea that artists working in a totalitarian dictatorship or tsarist autocracy are secretly and slightly shamefully envied by artists who work in freedom. They have the gratification of intense interest: the authorities want to put them in jail while there are younger readers for whom what they write is pure oxygen.