I never wanted to go to university: books seemed to have all the answers, and the questions, too. I went to work for Jean Muir as her in-house model. Miss Muir - as she will always be to me - was interested in everything.

The press have given me affairs I've never had and killed a few I did have. After a while, you learn.

I'm boiling about the rainforests being chopped down to make disposable chopsticks. I'm boiling about the fact that we have palm oil put into every single one of our substances.

Though I was a mother at 21, being a grandmother makes the whole thing absolutely normal and gorgeous. The relief, the joy of being a grandmother is wonderful.

I'm aware of my body.

I've never felt the constraints of social acceptability.

I find it a great antidote... lipstick and mirrors and hairspray.

I would do anything to keep looking the job. I think you make an extra effort if you're on show.

If you're an enthusiast and you love the world like I do, it comes naturally. But I think charity must become more fun to give, more interactive and imaginative.

We transported eight giraffes, and there are now nine because one gave birth to a male shortly afterwards. They carry their pregnancies very well-they all looked the same.

I can't see any difference in having your hair dyed, your teeth fixed, your nose done, or your face smoothed out or lifted.

When you're young, you think life is forever, but it's finite. I'm 68, so even by the maddest measurements, I'm in the last bit of life.

All the trouble you will cause by not leaving a will. All the heartache! Family feuds are going to happen anyway, so be as clear as you can. And even if it's only to leave it to the cat's home, make a will.

Learn from nature. Stuff lives and stuff dies all the time, you know. Animals and birds and flowers. Trees come and go, and we come and go. That's it. So we should all seize life and make the most of what we have while we can.

As soon as you reach a certain age, you're thrown onto a kind of mental scrap heap.

There's an appetite for vigour in films. The camera loves a bit of movement. Movement is usually attached to younger people and men, and that's just the way it is. I think that it's a bitter pill to swallow, but it's a fact that there aren't going to be masses and masses of roles for older women because there isn't the audience for it.

The maddening thing is as actors of either sex, we get better as we get older, and so when you are 65, you think, 'I could play Juliet now. I understand it.'

I used to go out wearing any old rubbish, no make-up, nothing, but since mobile phones, that has all had to stop. People do come up to you so often and say hello, or want a photograph, and I just can't do it anymore in what I used to wear. They don't want to be seen hanging off a rabid old granny any more than I do.

I always knew that good stuff would come along when I was older. So when I was 18, I longed to be 30; when I was 30, I longed to be 50. I've always looked forward to my next birthday.

Cameras love pretty girls and craggy, old character men more than they can take craggy, old character women. But that's what's always happened. Work out how you can fit into it, and make that work. There are never going to be millions of parts for older actresses because there never were.

I cut the labels out of my clothes because they scratch. Clothes are just little workhorses, aren't they?

If you haven't understood that if you are born you die, you scarcely deserve to be able to be alive.

I love a cardboard coffin. Both Mummy and Daddy went off in cardboard coffins, painted - Daddy's was rifle green. Beautifully made.

Even clingfilm - if it's gone over a salad bowl, take it off, use it again. I wash out carrier bags; I save brown paper from parcels. I save string; I save ribbons. I separate all my bits and pieces.

I switch off lights like a maniac. I drive at reasonable speeds so that I don't waste petrol.

I'm three quarters Scottish, but I sound English. I don't really see British as a race.

Romance is quite an overblown word. This idea of chocolates and champagne and that's it. There's more to love than that. Romance is quite a soppy word. Love is much more important.

I used to panic and get rattled when I was young, but as I've got older, I've started literally to live day to day. With age, you work out what matters.

I was 21 and had been going out with my boyfriend for two years when I found out I was pregnant - despite being told by doctors that I was sterile. Jamie's father and I hadn't discussed marriage, and to me, it wasn't something to be entered into just to stop gossip.

I don't lose my temper. I used to, but I realised I would probably die of a brain hemorrhage. So I've governed myself not to mind about things. I have no road rage or anything like that. Because it's life-shortening. And also, there's no need for it; it uses up energy.

To be in something as iconic as a Dracula film, and to be playing Jessica van Helsing, who would have been Dracula's choice for a bride, through history and beyond the grave, was a thrill.

I am mean as cats' meat about handbags: mine don't ever look chic. I always prefer bags that aren't made of leather.

I'm a pathetic haggler and often give more than the original price out of a misplaced sense of duty.

Ah, Scotland. I am three-parts Scottish and terribly proud of it, although maybe we should divide it into eighths, because my two-eighths are Danish and English, the Lumley part. But the bulk of the rest of me is Scottish - and Scottish ministers especially.

My great-great-great uncle - or maybe it's only two 'greats' - crossbred the first Aberdeen Angus.

Nobody tells you Rwanda looks like Tuscany with its tiled roofs.

I was involved with the landmines before the Princess of Wales, and nobody gave a damn about people losing their limbs. It only became a success when she came along.

I think that unless you can take judgments of right and wrong like an automaton, you must have emotions because that is our only way of moral guidance.

If the Gurkhas can't live in Britain, then I don't want to, either.

You see, there weren't these magazines like 'Heat' in my day. Always waiting to trip up these pretty girls and make them seem something horrible, something to make them look stupid and small and ugly and disgusting.

There was one 'crime' during the whole time I was at school, when a fountain pen went missing. Stealing just didn't happen. I was taught not to shoplift, not to steal, not to behave badly. We weren't even allowed to drop litter.

In Ethiopia... you might find a seven-year-old expected to take 15 goats out into the fields for the whole day with only a chapati to eat and his whistle. Why are we so afraid to give our children responsibilities like this?

I've always used my hair for whatever it is needed for. I had it an inch long and jet black for a Pinter play I did. Changes you completely.

I've had my run-ins with department stores, like Harrods, which stopped selling fur coats, but I found some there with fur trim, which is just as disgusting. Foie gras production is appalling - there's no excuse for selling it.

It's nice when you happen into a vegetarian restaurant, but really, you can find veggie food everywhere. Pastas, salads, a vegetable plate - I actually like ordering vegetarian in a meaty place because it gives them a jolt to come up with something and recognize the demand.

I'd describe myself as a saver, but just sometimes I can spend like a kicking horse! Ryman is the one shop I can't go past without going into. I just can't resist lovely stationery.

I think I'm a spiritual person. I don't really go to church often when services are on, but I like going in when they are empty and quiet, and just sitting there and thinking for a little while.

The concept of Shwopping is so clever, I think. The idea is that every time someone goes shopping, they can take an unwanted item of clothing and pop it in the recycling bin in their M&S store for Oxfam.

I do not like bad photographs. I don't like to be badly lit. There is a fashion, particularly on stage, for very 'toppy' lighting, which makes a child look 50. Ten o'clock is very good. If someone is taking a picture, you say, 'Lamps at 10 o'clock,' then everybody looks lovely.

Women are very different to men, and that hasn't been respected. So when people say there's never been a good woman painter or poet or engineer or whatever, they don't understand that our skills are many simultaneously and men's skills are single.