Judi Dench Quotes
English - Actress Born: December 9, 1934

Anything that we can do to improve the lives of elderly people is welcome so far as I am concerned.
Judi Dench

I don't think anybody can be told how to act. I think you can give advice. But you have to find your own way through it.
Judi Dench

I don't really want to retire. I intend to go on working as long as I can because I still have a huge amount of energy.
Judi Dench

It is not good to cross the bridge before you get to it.
Judi Dench

I think you should take your job seriously, but not yourself - that is the best combination.
Judi Dench

I was in Yorkshire. We were a family of five and I used to be sent sometimes to get the rations for the week and I was easily able to carry them back. It was like one egg and a tiny bit of tea.
Judi Dench

Since Michael died I think I've worked constantly. Friends and colleagues are very sustaining. They're the people who get you through it... It's no good to be on your own.
Judi Dench

In the theatre you can change things ever so slightly; it's an organic thing. Whereas in film you only have that chance on the day, and you have no control over it at all.
Judi Dench

The more I do, the more frightened I get. But that is essential. Otherwise why would I go on doing it?
Judi Dench

I would hate people to think bossy is all I can do.
Judi Dench

Because, you know, I can't work a bicycle pump.
Judi Dench

There are very few things that surprise me.
Judi Dench

I'm very conscious that I'm in the minority in that I love what I do. How big is the number of people who are running to work to do a job that they like? And how lucky to be employed at it - how incredibly lucky.
Judi Dench

I need to learn every day.
Judi Dench

The difficulty with any sort of esteem is that more is expected of you.
Judi Dench

I would like to work with Jack Nicholson, before it's too late.
Judi Dench

Actually, what I miss are people corpsing on stage.
Judi Dench

I wanted to be a set designer when I was young.
Judi Dench

I'd rather do a part because I want to, not because great things are expected of me.
Judi Dench

Frankly, I never had any intense desire to go to India. I know that sounds a bit strange, but it just never was someplace I had a burning desire to visit.
Judi Dench

I've always loved painting, although I never show anyone what I've done. Mainly because I don't do it well. But it's like a form of visual diary for me. A way of fixing things in my mind.
Judi Dench

Seriously, though, I think I never ceased to be grateful of the fact that I am able to do a job that I really love - I never got over that.
Judi Dench

I've figured out what to do so far, but it's always the next thing you come to where the man with the bucket of ice cold water is waiting - whoosh! in your face. That's why you work with directors who know what to tell you to do.
Judi Dench

I am so thrilled to be nominated for something I loved working on every single day.
Judi Dench

My husband was actually very keen that I would become a Bond girl.
Judi Dench

Some things you know about, you know what the ingredients are - maybe not all of them. But it's up to you to put in the amount. It's up to the director to nag you until you get it right.
Judi Dench

I think you've got to have your feet planted firmly on the ground, especially in this business, and you must not believe things that are said or written about you, because everything gets out of proportion one way or the other.
Judi Dench

It is true that there are few plays of Shakespeare that I haven't done.
Judi Dench

Michael died five years ago this January, and the first thing that really struck me about the script was the part about her peeling off from the funeral and just getting into a rowboat and having a real kind of cry where nobody was.
Judi Dench

The Lord Chamberlin was censoring scripts when I first came into the theater.
Judi Dench

And then it was working with Bob Hoskins, who I had never worked with before - except radio. It was like being given a wonderful meal - full of the things you love most.
Judi Dench

I have no control over a film. I don't know what will be left on the cutting floor.
Judi Dench

I just feel incredibly lucky to be employed when there are so many actors and actresses who are not employed. That's why, you know, I sometimes feel desperate, in case I'm not going to be cast again.
Judi Dench

I love being part of a company, and telling a story.
Judi Dench

In contrast, the control you have in a theatre is very attractive to me.
Judi Dench

I trained as a designer, so I'm always terribly keen about what I'm going to look like.
Judi Dench

I work out the other bits, too, but I need to know what I look like, very early on. And then it's like a template; I'll fill that person out. If I get that out of the way, then I'm all right.
Judi Dench

It actually was a complete departure having a woman playing M. I didn't realize at the time that it would be so noticed.
Judi Dench

It was good to learn so early. They're not going to be kind to you. You have to do it and get on, and then gulp down and get better.
Judi Dench

People think you know beforehand when you win an Oscar - I can assure you you don't.
Judi Dench

Sometimes nudity is gratuitous. We just live in a society where everything goes.
Judi Dench

The theater is the thing I love doing most.
Judi Dench

It's incredibly moving to hear some of our greatest actors performing Shakespeare.
Judi Dench

I can't read scripts any more because of the trouble with my eyes.
Judi Dench

I've got what my ma had, macular degeneration, which you get when you get old.
Judi Dench

People seem to have this idea that I've always been very ambitious. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Judi Dench

Work certainly does help fill a void.
Judi Dench

I don't think that care homes are all rotten old places that ought to be shut down.
Judi Dench


Susanna Moore Quotes
American - Writer Born: December 9, 1945

The history of Hawaii may be seen as a story of arrivals.
Susanna Moore

On its 2015 list, the Fish and Wildlife Service included the 'ea, or hawksbill turtle, as well as the green turtle, Ridley sea turtle, leatherback turtle and loggerhead turtle. Four mammals are considered endangered: the Hawaiian hoary bat; the kohola, or humpback whale; the sperm whale; and the endemic Hawaiian monk seal.
Susanna Moore

The chance of any species reaching and then surviving on an island as distant as one of the Hawaiian chain is infinitesimal, but despite the extraordinary odds, plants and seeds found their way ashore, carried by the tide or blown by trade winds, inside birds or in their feathers, in the branches of trees and in the jetsam of sunken ships.
Susanna Moore

People will be able to survive, of course, without honeycreepers and monk seals. But if the wolf spider is in trouble, we are in trouble, too.
Susanna Moore

Each year, I await with dread the federal government's catalog of endangered and threatened species in the Hawaiian Islands, where I was raised and where I live.
Susanna Moore

'In the Cut' was not what readers expected of me. Before it was published, I was seen as a women's writer, which meant that I wrote movingly about flowers and children.
Susanna Moore

The task of understanding the past is neverending.
Susanna Moore

'Calcutta is a pot of honey' means that in the first half of the nineteenth century, before the society became truly Victorian in feeling and tone, Bengal was a place to make money. The governor-generals returned to England rich men. It was a bountiful, lush, prosperous, easy place to make a fortune - in coal, in jute, and particularly cloth.
Susanna Moore

'Forever Amber,' written by Kathleen Winsor in 1944, was banned in Boston at the time of its publication as obscene and offensive. This alone would have been enough to excite my interest, but in 1956, it was sitting inoffensively on the shelves of the small country library on the north shore of Oahu, Hawaii, where my family spent its summers.
Susanna Moore

Young writers reasonably say, 'I don't know what to write about,' so writing about yourself is a very literal way to begin.
Susanna Moore

The point always is to be writing something - it leads to more writing.
Susanna Moore

I was betting on cockfights in the Filipino workers' camps when I was 11.
Susanna Moore

While I was writing 'The Big Girls,' I had to take a big breath each morning and calm myself sufficiently to once again enter that world. But friends tell me that it is the only thing that really interests me. They say that I like to be upset.
Susanna Moore

Women are completely disadvantaged - despite what men will say. It is not a fair fight.
Susanna Moore

Writing can't be taught.
Susanna Moore

Transgressive to me means breaking the rules and sinning. I don't see myself as breaking the rules and sinning. I'm really interested in what it means to be female.
Susanna Moore

When I was nine, I was taught to ride a surfboard in Waikiki by the beach boy Rabbit Kekai.
Susanna Moore

As a girl, I sat awestruck at the feet of Harriet Ne, author of 'Tales of Molokai'. It was she who used to say, 'I myself have seen it,' after telling a particularly hair-raising ghost story - a phrase that I borrowed for one of my titles.
Susanna Moore

I lived in Calcutta for five months in 1999. While I was there, I read many journals, diaries, collections of letters and histories.
Susanna Moore

It is possible to say that all of my books concern themselves with the notion of what it means to be female - whether it is in New York City in 2000 or Calcutta in 1836. In that way, my books really are the same.
Susanna Moore

When I was 23, I went to work for Jack Nicholson reading scripts. Later, I was married to a production designer named Richard Sylbert. So I lived in Los Angeles for ten years.
Susanna Moore

The world of womens' prisons is indeed a microcosm.
Susanna Moore

I have to admit that I was very happy to finish 'In the Cut,' and happy not to return to it.
Susanna Moore

'The Big Girls' has always seemed to me to be a story about different kinds of families - a divorced mother with a child; a father with his child and his girlfriend; a mother of three children, suffering from postpartum depression; and the rigid artificial families maintained by women in prison - all potentially perilous.
Susanna Moore


Gioconda Belli Quotes
American - Author Born: December 9, 1948

The world has always gone forward when people have dared to have crazy ideas.
Gioconda Belli

Sexuality surrounds us like a dangerous aura. The same reverence that is given to the spirit is not given to the flesh. We have had a sexual revolution, but the sexual revolution only has made sex more pervasive. It hasn't granted the level of reverence and respect that it should have.
Gioconda Belli

There is nothing quixotic or romantic in wanting to change the world. It is possible. It is the age-old vocation of all humanity.
Gioconda Belli

I never thought that sex was wrong, sinful, dirty. When you take away the thought of things being dirty or forbidden, then you can really enjoy your sensuality.
Gioconda Belli

There are not many intellectuals left of Harold Pinter's stature who dare raise their voices - and with such force - against the menace of U.S. and the unrestricted use of its power. Pinter's voice is an unceasing thunder.
Gioconda Belli

There is a biological power that is intrinsic to the woman, to the female condition. Because you are able to give life. You are the reproducer of the species. Men feel very weak in front of a woman because a woman is capable of eliciting a number of instincts in a man. And that is what has made men very nervous about women.
Gioconda Belli

Novels give you the opportunity to create a whole world. Because you create people, you make them talk... You decide who they are, whether they live or die. It's the closest thing to feeling like a god that you can come to.
Gioconda Belli

Books have the power to be the light we are seeking at crucial moments in our lives. Reading helps us realize we are not alone, that we can change our circumstances and even achieve the impossible.
Gioconda Belli

I had a very good sexual education. My mother was very advanced in that regard. She conveyed to me the sense of reverence and wonder about my body and the powers of my sexuality not only to give life, but also to be a whole person and to enjoy pleasure. It was put to me as an almost holy act.
Gioconda Belli

My son lives in Nicaragua. My daughters live in the United States.
Gioconda Belli

Poetry for me is very easy. It's like a lightning bolt. I feel this calling, and the first line of the poem comes into my head, and I just have to go to the page, to the typewriter, to the computer or whatever and write it.
Gioconda Belli

We have built our identities in many respects based on the guilt-ridden stories we have been told about our creation. For women, it is a very damning knowledge to be portrayed as curious and careless seductresses.
Gioconda Belli

It had never crossed my mind that a man could think he had the right to stop me from being who I was.
Gioconda Belli

Never was my political stance determined by the men I was with. I had my own ideas.
Gioconda Belli

I am convinced that the reason why my kids have become very fulfilled and achieving human beings is because I wasn't raising them alone.
Gioconda Belli

I grew up in a very difficult country, a very oppressive situation because of the Somoza dictatorship. My family was in opposition to Somoza; Somoza was a liberal, and my family were conservatives. These were the two traditional parties in Nicaragua.
Gioconda Belli