Emma Thompson Quotes

“Its unfortunate and I really wish I wouldn't have to say this, but I really like human beings who have suffered. They're kinder.”

— Emma Thompson

“There is a painful difference between the expectation of an unpleasant event and its final certainty.”

— Emma Thompson

“Marianne Dashwood looks at gray skies and sees blue. That's all very well, and it's not something you ever want entirely to lose. But you must lose a little of it; otherwise you're going to get wet.”

— Emma Thompson

“Children are the most wonderful audiences. What's struck me most is that that they watch it so silently, until the end when they shriek and shout and clap.”

— 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

“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

“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

“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

“Edward finds Elinor crying for her dead father, offers her his handkerchief and their love story commences. Ang [Lee] very anxious that we think about what we want to do. I'm very anxious not to do anything and certainly not to think about it.”

— Emma Thompson

This morning, I went to wipe my hands on a tea towel, and while I was using it, it seemed like it felt a bit light. I unfolded it and realized my daughter had cut little bits out of it to make frocks for her dolls!

— Emma Thompson

“The thing that influenced me most in relation to 'Nanny McPhee' were the Westerns I watched with my father. All the Spaghetti Westerns; all the Virginians; all the High Chaparrals. Because if you think about the form, it's a stranger from out of town.”

— Emma Thompson

“I have a nervous breakdown in the film and in one scene I get to stand at the top of the stairs waving an empty sherry bottle which is, of course, a typical scene from my daily life, so isn't much of a stretch.”

— 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

“Maybe I don't take myself so seriously any more. And I don't care how I'm judged. I'm past all that.”

— Emma Thompson

“I was brought up by very witty people who were dealing with quite difficult things: disease and death ... I was brought up by people who tended to giggle at funerals.”

— 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

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

— Emma Thompson

“Kissing Hugh was lovely. Glad I invented it. Can't rely on Austen for a snog, that's for sure.”

— Emma Thompson

“Families are weird. You'd think that people who live and eat and sleep in the same place would always have a lot in common. But sometimes they don't have anything in common AT ALL. You can have a brother who really likes ballet and a sister who thinks it's girlie. You could probably have Darth Vader and Mickey Mouse in the same family; they're that weird.”

— Emma Thompson

“The trouble is it's very difficult to pin-point the most important thing because Aids affects everyone in different levels of society, differently and you have to respond to it differently.”

— Emma Thompson

“My appearance has changed a lot over the years, but it has far more to do with how I feel about being a woman.”

— Emma Thompson

“Sometimes I get to put on posh frocks and be Madam Glamour, the vendor of my wares. My lovely friend Kath, a stylist, puts me into things I'd never dream of. But my real life is very different. It's very, very home-based - an intense domestic life, that's the core of everything.”

— Emma Thompson

What was important was trying to create something that families could watch together and enjoy together.

— Emma Thompson

“I understand what it's like to come with your family, and to uproot yourself and come to another culture. You need a lot of support. People say, 'She's got her daughter; she's got her husband.' Yeah, but she hasn't got anyone else.”

— Emma Thompson

“But when I lose my temper, I find it difficult to forgive myself. I feel I've failed. I can be calm in a crisis, in the face of death or things that hurt badly. I don't get hysterical, which may be masochistic of me.”

— Emma Thompson

A lot of people in my world - in the acting world - have either lost friends to Aids or live with HIV because its origin in our culture, in New York for instance, was in the gay community.

— Emma Thompson

“I'm an atheist. I suppose you can call me a sort of libertarian anarchist. I regard religion with fear and suspicion. It's not enough to say that I don't believe in God. I actually regard the system as distressing: I am offended by some of the things said in the Bible and the Qur'an and I refute them.”

— Emma Thompson

Why do we wear them? They're so painful.

— Emma Thompson

“I want a different world. One where I don't wake up thinking I'm so lucky to be able to feed my daughter, and able to give people a clean drink of water. I don't want images of starving babies at the breast in my mind. I want that to change. And if I want that, I had better do something about it.”

— Emma Thompson

“I think we're creating a situation that's incredibly dangerous. There's a lot of chat at the moment about the war on terror and whilst there are many causes for acts of terrorism, what kind of society are you creating if you allow civil society in Africa to die and create millions upon millions of orphans? Where are they going to go? What kind of cults, what kind of militias, what's going to happen? The accession of violence in those countries, the possibility of that, to me is very terrifying.”

— Emma Thompson

Laughter is a celebration of our failings. That's what clowns are for. And that's what I am.

— Emma Thompson

“I think it's [the AIDS fight] the most important and most pressing one - I think it's a global emergency and I think in a way we all have to address it and engage with it because I think it's the biggest threat to the human race that we have ever faced.”

— Emma Thompson

“I was in Los Angeles making 'Dead Again' and the producer, Lindsay Doran , asked me if I'd be interested in adapting this book, .. Austen is my favorite author and I thought, 'Well, of course, I'd be very interested, but I don't know how. I don't know where to start, A, writing a screenplay and B, sort of adapting it from a great novel.”

— Emma Thompson

“My husband is here and I'd like to thank him, for many things, but first of all for pointing out that I had a big hole in my frock and then that my nipples were pointing in different directions. It's good to have an expert there to help you with that sort of thing.”

— Emma Thompson

“I've never been on the cover of Empire. I'm very bitter. I've got an award but now I feel sad and cross.”

— Emma Thompson

“The insanity of consumption bothers me. Talk about the opiate of the masses. It ain't religion anymore. It's stuff.”

— Emma Thompson

“The best way [to survive] the red carpet is by wearing Ugg boots. But unfortunately, I have not yet managed to persuade the people who style me at these times to let me do that.”

— Emma Thompson

“It's such a cold night and it's the only time I've actively been grateful for menopause. I've been entirely comfortable.”

— Emma Thompson

“Well, I met Sandy Bullock at an awards thing a couple years ago, and she said to me, 'If I were gay, you'd be the one.' and I said, 'I'm there!'”

— Emma Thompson

“[Fighting Climate Change] is important for every single person on the planet, which is why it has to be the greatest grassroots movement of all time. This is the battle of our lives. We're fighting for our children.”

— Emma Thompson

“If you can't fail then how can you possible develop as a communicator or as a creator of anything? We are locked into a deeply unhealthy notion that somehow you've got to succeed all the time. An appalling notion. Any painter or writer will tell you that that is no way to proceed. One of the things that will kill off a decent actor, especially a young actor early on and they will never recover from it, is too much success. It's disastrous. You stop being criticized, therefore you stop challenging yourself. You then can't afford to fail because there's too far to fall.”

— Emma Thompson

“I think that the Bible as a system of moral guidance in the 21st century is insufficient, to put it mildly. I feel quite strongly that we need a new moral lodestone if we can't rely on what is inside our own selves. Which I think, actually, is pretty reliable.”

— Emma Thompson

I am who I am, and there is nothing I can do about that.

— Emma Thompson

I present the nominees, well, not me the Voice of God, for Best Screenplay.

— Emma Thompson

“I think my first bout of that was when I was doing me and My Girl, funnily enough. I really didn't change my clothes or answer the phone, but went into the theatre every night and was cheerful and sang the Lambeth Walk. She said: "The only thing I could do was write. I used to crawl from the bedroom to the computer and just sit and write, and then I was alright, because I was not present. "Sense and Sensibility really saved me from going under, I think, in a very nasty way.”

— Emma Thompson

“Without the ice, the earth will fall”

— Emma Thompson

Anyone who tries to deny #ClimateChange looks a little bit bonkers.

— Emma Thompson

“Let's stop feeling so guilty about global warming”

— Emma Thompson

“If there's a role you're playing and there's a great deal of material to explore because the person was real then it's a completely different preparation time and message to playing someone fictional.”

— Emma Thompson