Joanna Lumley Quotes

Though I was a mother at 21, being a grandmother makes the whole thing absolutely normal and gorgeous. The relief, the joy of being a grandmother is wonderful.

I'm a pathetic haggler and often give more than the original price out of a misplaced sense of duty.

I'd describe myself as a saver, but just sometimes I can spend like a kicking horse! Ryman is the one shop I can't go past without going into. I just can't resist lovely stationery.

As soon as you reach a certain age, you're thrown onto a kind of mental scrap heap.

That's the staggering, humorous thing about money. If you haven't got taste, money doesn't matter: You'll always look ghastly.

I used to panic and get rattled when I was young, but as I've got older, I've started literally to live day to day. With age, you work out what matters.

If you haven't understood that if you are born you die, you scarcely deserve to be able to be alive.

I used to go out wearing any old rubbish, no make-up, nothing, but since mobile phones, that has all had to stop. People do come up to you so often and say hello, or want a photograph, and I just can't do it anymore in what I used to wear. They don't want to be seen hanging off a rabid old granny any more than I do.

I'm very good at getting up in the morning - so much of my life has been spent on film sets where we start at the crack of dawn.

I was 21 and had been going out with my boyfriend for two years when I found out I was pregnant - despite being told by doctors that I was sterile. Jamie's father and I hadn't discussed marriage, and to me, it wasn't something to be entered into just to stop gossip.

I always knew that good stuff would come along when I was older. So when I was 18, I longed to be 30; when I was 30, I longed to be 50. I've always looked forward to my next birthday.

Cameras love pretty girls and craggy, old character men more than they can take craggy, old character women. But that's what's always happened. Work out how you can fit into it, and make that work. There are never going to be millions of parts for older actresses because there never were.

Nobody tells you Rwanda looks like Tuscany with its tiled roofs.

China invaded Tibet. It invaded it. So all this nonsense about them being the same country is absurd. It's called Tibet. If it was part of China, it would be called China, wouldn't it?

I'm three quarters Scottish, but I sound English. I don't really see British as a race.

I think I'm a spiritual person. I don't really go to church often when services are on, but I like going in when they are empty and quiet, and just sitting there and thinking for a little while.

I love a cardboard coffin. Both Mummy and Daddy went off in cardboard coffins, painted - Daddy's was rifle green. Beautifully made.

You can't be vain as an actor. In 'Ab Fab,' we were made up as old women with bald wigs and jowly necks, and we looked fantastic.

I'm tall with broad shoulders, and therefore, I like clothes with a bit of a swagger - mannish clothes that you can wear with a lot of feminine, sweet tops. I put my own looks together - a favourite coat, a bit of vintage, a bit of high street.

In Ethiopia ... you might find a seven-year-old expected to take 15 goats out into the fields for the whole day with only a chapati to eat and his whistle. Why are we so afraid to give our children responsibilities like this?

People have always tut-tutted about actors stepping out of line politically. And I can sort of see it because what you've got your fame for is not being someone who can influence things, so it's cheating.

Film work is hard work. It's long days, and quite often quite dismaying locations you have to be in.

I'm a vegetarian, and I long for people to eat less meat, but the thing to do is not to go, 'Eat! Less! Meat!' It's to say, 'I am fit as a flea and I'm 63, I haven't eaten meat for 40 years, and I never get diseases, I'm never ill, and I'm full of energy. So how's about that?'

It's so important to keep a marriage alive with small treats and doing little things for each other. Just remembering to say nice things and to have listening time is vital. That ghastly phrase 'quality time' means taking three minutes to sit down and be still with someone rather than yelling over your shoulder as you rush out.

It's an incredibly difficult thing to bring a giraffe down. They can kill a lion with a single blow from their feet.

Death is nothing at all. I have only slipped away into the next room.

We met and married when both of us knew exactly what our jobs were. He was only 32, but he'd been all over the place. I'd been working on films and television shows all over the world.

I don't do girlfriendy sort of things, like shopping or going to spas. Spas fill me with horror. Frankly, I'd be more interested in doing a walk through the sewers of London!

I never go to the gym - I can't be doing with it. But I run up and down the stairs, wash my feet in the basin to keep supple, and I don't eat things that have a pulse.

Giraffes are completely tranquil - they have no predators as adults because there's not an animal in the jungle stupid enough to go for them.

My grandmother is a famous atlas.

I am now an old lioness, if I see my young ones getting out of order, I've got to be able to say to them this is not how lions behave. This is not right.

Learn from nature. Stuff lives and stuff dies all the time, you know. Animals and birds and flowers. Trees come and go, and we come and go. That's it. So we should all seize life and make the most of what we have while we can.

If you're an enthusiast and you love the world like I do, it comes naturally. But I think charity must become more fun to give, more interactive and imaginative.

Even clingfilm - if it's gone over a salad bowl, take it off, use it again. I wash out carrier bags; I save brown paper from parcels. I save string; I save ribbons. I separate all my bits and pieces.

I do not like bad photographs. I don't like to be badly lit. There is a fashion, particularly on stage, for very 'toppy' lighting, which makes a child look 50. Ten o'clock is very good. If someone is taking a picture, you say, 'Lamps at 10 o'clock,' then everybody looks lovely.

In petrol stations on the motorways where people have left the place looking messy, I clear up each lavatory I happen to have occupied. When people drop paper on the ground, and everything like that, I pick it up, put it in the lavatory, and make that room look nice.

Hundreds of political prisoners still suffer in Tibetan prisons. Freedom of speech is not allowed in any sense. It is illegal to possess a photo of the Dalai Lama.

Theyre not group animals, theyre completely solitary, so if the babys mother is taken away, theres no system of aunts ... their whole system is destroyed.

Clothes that are too tight make you look bigger. If you've been trying to shed pounds, and it doesn't go, buy the next size up. I never care what size my clothes are.

I can't see any difference in having your hair dyed, your teeth fixed, your nose done, or your face smoothed out or lifted.

I've been given this blessing, which is my granddaughter. You're no longer just you. You suddenly fit into the chest of drawers of life.

I quite often don't have breakfast, and I never have lunch. I find it helps not to wake my stomach up because if I had a good big breakfast, I would be ready for a snack at 11 and then a three-course lunch, then I'd be ready for tea, then a cocktail and then an enormous dinner.

We transported eight giraffes, and there are now nine because one gave birth to a male shortly afterwards. They carry their pregnancies very well-they all looked the same.

My mother early on taught us to respect all animals, and I mean all animals - not just cats and dogs but rats and snakes and spiders and fish and wildlife, so I really grew up believing they are just like us and just as deserving of consideration.

I switch off lights like a maniac. I drive at reasonable speeds so that I don't waste petrol.

As Brits, we love a do, don't we? I adore our national celebrations. If I see a gold coach, you almost need to put me in a straitjacket, I get so excited.

Greece has got something like 1,400 islands. There is so much of Greece you can't know even if you're Greek. It's sprinkled out all around the edge of the Aegean, all over the place. It's already a secret place wherever you go, even if it's somewhere huge like Athens or Corinth. The place enchanted me.

To be in something as iconic as a Dracula film, and to be playing Jessica van Helsing, who would have been Dracula's choice for a bride, through history and beyond the grave, was a thrill.

We've forgotten to respect clothes and consider who made them and where the material came from. We've been encouraged to buy things and, if we don't like them, bin them. When I grew up, we'd repair things or alter them.

I was involved with the landmines before the Princess of Wales, and nobody gave a damn about people losing their limbs. It only became a success when she came along.

Giraffes are fairytale animals, almost heraldic - as if from the land of fables. They have extremely beautiful faces, huge eyes, very sensitive nostrils and oh, blue tongues!

I could never go into politics, because I'm far too impatient and I'd want to be a dictator, albeit a benevolent one ... I would hope.

My great-great-great uncle - or maybe it's only two 'greats' - crossbred the first Aberdeen Angus.

I think we could jam a bit more in our coffins than we do. I'm going to have some books, some I haven't finished or haven't read, some feathers and nice bits and pieces, the odd note. Just on the journey for the next bit.

To be a judge you don't have to know about books, you have to be skilled at picking shrapnel out of your head.

If the Gurkhas can't live in Britain, then I don't want to, either.

I would do anything to keep looking the job. I think you make an extra effort if you're on show.

You have to feel more involved than just writing out a cheque. Charity is almost the wrong word - I think people are beginning to feel more responsible for the world.

If your family loves you, you're fine. What you can't grow up without is love.

Oh, I'm not beautiful. I can look beautiful; I can put beauty on. When I'm tired, I look bloody awful. I think I'm turning into the actress from 'Dynasty,' Linda Evans.

When I was trying to get into acting, to have been a model was about as low as you could get in the acting profession. But that wasn't sexism, it was snobbery, which I knew and took very humbly.

Romance is quite an overblown word. This idea of chocolates and champagne and that's it. There's more to love than that. Romance is quite a soppy word. Love is much more important.

You see, there weren't these magazines like 'Heat' in my day. Always waiting to trip up these pretty girls and make them seem something horrible, something to make them look stupid and small and ugly and disgusting.

A lot of us are ruled by fear during our lives - afraid we'll get burgled, afraid a dog will bite us, afraid we'll get fat, afraid someone will leave us. Once you lose fear, life becomes sweeter, and that happens as you get older. I'm sure by the time I'm 80, I'll be able to do absolutely anything!

The press have given me affairs I've never had and killed a few I did have. After a while, you learn.

I think that unless you can take judgments of right and wrong like an automaton, you must have emotions because that is our only way of moral guidance.

Women are very different to men, and that hasn't been respected. So when people say there's never been a good woman painter or poet or engineer or whatever, they don't understand that our skills are many simultaneously and men's skills are single.

I've been dealing with the press for 45 years. You need a very long spoon to sup with them. While you are always grateful, they are like badly trained dogs. They smile and wag and bite your arm off.

Buy an atlas and keep it by the bed - remember you can go anywhere.

I think laptops should be banned from schools. Until you can prove you can add up on your fingers or think independently in your head, you have learnt nothing.

I've never felt the constraints of social acceptability.

Way back in the 1970s, I was eating a steak, and I looked down, and for the first time it suddenly looked like flesh to me - like a dead creature. In a flash, I realized that every time I ate any kind of meat, something had been killed for me, and I stopped eating all animals, not just cows and pigs but chickens and fish.

I cut the labels out of my clothes because they scratch. Clothes are just little workhorses, aren't they?

All you have to be is kind. That's all you need. Once you've got that, it virtually rules out everything else.

All the trouble you will cause by not leaving a will. All the heartache! Family feuds are going to happen anyway, so be as clear as you can. And even if it's only to leave it to the cat's home, make a will.

I prefer not to eat food that has a face.

I was once kissed on the lips by a giraffe, and I don't think I've ever got over it.

I'm aware of my body.

It's nice when you happen into a vegetarian restaurant, but really, you can find veggie food everywhere. Pastas, salads, a vegetable plate - I actually like ordering vegetarian in a meaty place because it gives them a jolt to come up with something and recognize the demand.

I don't lose my temper. I used to, but I realised I would probably die of a brain hemorrhage. So I've governed myself not to mind about things. I have no road rage or anything like that. Because it's life-shortening. And also, there's no need for it; it uses up energy.

I love being a grandmother. That feeling you have for your own child - you don't ever think it will be replicated, and I did wonder if I would have to 'pretend' with my grandchildren. But my heart was taken on day one.

I never mind scrubbing floors, vacuuming or bending and carrying stuff. Each time I do it I think, this is instead of going to the gym.

I think handbags, not so much clothes anymore, but I think you can tell a fashion victim by their handbag.