Vanessa Redgrave

The stories of the first refugees that I ever came across in literature - that lots of people ever came across - were in 'The Iliad': the escape of Aeneas with his father on his back, the Trojans, from their burning city, and the defeat of their kingdom and what they had to do to try and find safety.

I liked film-making, but the most difficult thing was the editing. I found it tormentingly difficult.

I got my first film break because the director Karel Reisz saw me at a small theater party.

In my early days, I auditioned a lot. Mostly, I didn't get anywhere.

The notion of 'building a career' had never been heard or dreamed of when I was young.

I acted with Albie at Stratford-on-Avon in the 1959 season. We in the acting company tended to hang out at the pub known as the Dirty Duck.

I don't want to spend my last few whatever it is, months or years on this earth, giving speeches.

Principles aren't something you hear much from politicians these days. Have you noticed? Right across the board, leaders, whatever the political coloring, avoid talking about laws; they avoid talking about principles. They talk about 'our values.' But values can change, and all our packets of 'values' seem to be getting smaller.

I thought my story, my experiences as a 2-year-old 'evacuee' from London at the outset of the war, could be important. What happened to me as a child was very light compared to what happened to many children, but... in Britain, there are so many people who just don't know our history.

I've been working for refugees for years and years and years.

I didn't plan that there'd be this awful situation in which our European governments, just to start the story off, breaking the Geneva conventions on the protection on the human rights of refugees.

You can get numbed. People can get hardened. It's not their fault; they just get hardened. News media get hardened. Proprietors get even harder.

People talk about preaching to the converted, which is total codswallop rubbish. There is no such thing as being converted forever - absolutely no such thing.

A film can open hearts and minds that have been closed, for whatever reasons.

My uncles and my father were all in the Royal Navy. One of my uncles, as a matter of fact, was drowned in the Sea of Singapore, having been fighting for the Royal Navy behind enemy lines, Japanese lines, in the hinterland of Singapore.

I don't think my life has been badly lived - but I don't think of it that way. And nor should I.

Just being alive, staying human, I think that's infinitely precious.

I think everybody, including myself, are in danger of losing our humanity.

I've identified all my life with refugees.

I've still got to do something to help, however tiny it is. I always think of the old Hebrew saying, which is translated roughly into, 'He who saves one life saves the world,' because it's pretty ghastly to think of all the people we're not saving.

Politics is about divisions. Wherever you come in on the subject, there are divisions.

We are child-bearers primarily, and we are the weaker sex, and once we've given birth to our children, our life is by necessity bound to them. I wouldn't advocate it any other way.

The society Shakespeare knew was heading for tremendous change, and he seems to have recognized that and written about it in a coded way. I understand those codes, I think.

Shakespeare lets us see real people undergoing real processes, with real feelings.

A theater is being given over to market forces, which means that a whole generation that should be able to do theater as well as see it is being completely deprived.