Success means your thoughts are worthy of everyone's consideration.

You know, I'm not a revolutionary.

What you have to understand about period drama is that it's 'history light.'

You see, in America, it’s quite standard for an actor to sign, at the beginning of a series, for five or seven years. The maximum any British agent will allow you to have over an actor is three years.

I think other people’s depression is frightfully dreary, don’t you?

If there’s one thing I don’t look for in a maid, it’s discretion. Except with my own secrets, of course.

Physical beauty is a subject that many skirt around and almost everyone attempts to down-play thereby demonstrating some sound moral stance, but it remains one of the glories of human existence. Of course, there are many people who are attractive without being beautiful just as there are beauties who bore, and the danger of beauty in the very young is that it can make the business of life seem deceptively easy.

I’m seen as a chronicler of the class system, which I don’t think is unfair.

Most of us don’t want to be outsiders.

I have fits of melancholia when I watch the news, but we all do, don’t we?