Rachel Weisz

There’s a lot of contemporary actresses I admire, but there’s practically no one who’s made a color movie whose career I’d want … I don’t feel very modern at all.

I’ve never felt uncomfortable with my level of fame. I don’t get hassled. Maybe sometimes in a minor way, but New Yorkers are much too cool for that. The thing is, you choose to be an actress, but not to be a celebrity.

I don’t do too well there. If you were brought up in London, where you can walk around everywhere and there are theaters, you can’t really do LA. I couldn’t make a life there. You’re in a car all the time, and there are no seasons.

Yes, I watch what I eat but I don’t deny myself red wine or chocolate, the great things in life one can’t live without.

The celebrity thing… I don’t want to sound as if I absolutely don’t want it because that’s not true. If you’re in the entertainment business, you have to be honest. There’s something alluring about it…

In reality, the main thing that keeps me awake at night is probably the destruction of the planet; that’s what gets me pretty upset.

I believe that in life you should always take the serious things lightly and the light things seriously. This attitude of mine gets me into a lot of trouble.

So, uh, get ready for a barely changed version of Obamacare called Trumpcare, which sounds like a health care plan where doctors feel your breasts for lumps whether you ask them to or not.

Attending an all-girls school has its advantages, there are no inhibitions. You can walk to school with your zit cream on and your hair in rollers and nobody cares.

The show doesn’t go on because it’s ready; it goes on because it’s 11:30.

When I was producing on my own, I was doing it in order to – in a very patriarchal entertainment industry, let alone planet – very much hell-bent on trying to prove to myself, if nothing else, that I could do it as a woman.

I believe I could do dance on ice, or play in a musical of Freud’s life called ‘It’s Your Mother’ – or maybe one for the symbolists: ‘Jung at Heart’. There’s always the one about India: ‘The Gandhi Man Can’.

It’s more egalitarian on the Internet – anyone can put anything up. But in terms of the money it takes to allow a band to get good, there’s less of it to invest.

I’ve deliberately tried to calm myself down because eventually I want to be a good role model to my kids.

Cocaine is God’s way of saying that you’re making too much money.

Gay people don’t actually try to convert people. That’s Jehovah’s Witnesses you’re thinking of.

I almost chopped my thumb off once. Just before I left home, I was about ten or eleven years old, and I was trying to open a bone. Can you imagine that? A bone! I was trying to get the marrow out of a bone, and I took the ax, and I went to chop it, and something slipped, and the ax went right down there and damn near cut it off

Our president-elect [Trump] has at various times said he’d bomb civilians, loot oil, and waterboard, which isn’t a military strategy so much as the series of words that Donald Rumsfeld mutters so he can stay hard while he’s masturbating.

I love old music, old movies, screwball comedies, vintage clothes and basically I’m an old-fashioned gal.

I’m my worst critic and I always want to give people something better than I gave them before.

One Christmas, when Freddie and I were flatmates in Kensington, we were trying to cook Christmas dinner but all we had was a packet of bread sauce that you make with water. We used to dream of a can of beans. (…) At Ridge Farm, when we weren’t working we would swim, play bad tennis, bad snooker and be beaten at table tennis by Freddie. I think he had been the champion at his boarding school and I never, ever saw him lose a game. That summer was more like a youth club rather than wild parties. In the evenings we would go down to the pub, come back to the barn and play more music.