Romola Garai Quotes

I am always naturally drawn to heroines that have human flaws because I enjoy people that have lived their life with courage and make big successes and big failures.

If you're going to make great art, you have to make it at a huge cost - you have to be prepared to sacrifice what other people think of you, other people's opinions, and you have to make personal sacrifices.

I wouldn't want to direct - I think that's a very different job. You have to be a very specific type of person to do that.

I wish I was a more adventurous person in a way. But actually, security is a really big deal for me.

I try not to live in the future too much; that can make you crazy as an actor. There are so many people who are obsessed about their career path, like it's something which you can control, which fundamentally you can't.

The language of freedom-fighting was so co-opted by the baby boomers in order to express their now-hopelessly compromised ideologies that no other generation could emulate it without a smirk. This has created an apathetic generation in the West, with young people no longer distinguishing between the old order and the new.

The worst thing you can do as a performer is to judge your character in any way, positively or negatively.

I'd always try to get a C, maybe a B. Other girls would trot off a brilliant essay and go off to Oxford; I'd think: 'Where is the justice?' I took A-levels in English, history and theatre studies and got three Bs.

Postwar Europe was morally stagnant, and there was a lot of neo-conservatism.

I think I was quite lucky in that I went to an all-girls school. I was never put in an environment where I had to be the other - the woman as opposed to the man - all the way through my education. I was never made to feel that way at home.

I get grumpy about the innate conservatism of our tastes; I love bold theatre, and I get annoyed when a heritage piece is really successful.

There's no way I could ring up a company that was lending me a red-carpet dress and say, 'Do you have it in a 10?' Because all the press samples are an 8 - I would say a 'small 8.'

Acting is a strange job because your control is very limited.

When you talk to women who were working as print journalists or in broadcasting in the '50s, and then you talk to women who were working in the late '60s, there's an enormous difference. There had already been a huge transition. Then, of course, you get well into the '70s and there were women with children working.

I've always scribbled, and I still do it. I've written numerous scripts for films for which I think I'd be perfect as the complex, intelligent and, yes, modern heroine. Embarrassingly bad, all of them. I've had to come to terms with the fact that I'm not a writer.

I'd actually really love to review books and films and plays, but you can't be an artist and a critic. I would love it if I could.

A passion for any novel, and any character, can crystallise your ideas when you really need to be as open as possible as a performer.

I have a very strong, probably slightly aggressive personality, and so that just ends up coming out regardless of what I try to do.

Nowadays, most women just assume they have a right to be in the workplace, and any kind of discrimination they suffer is sort of more creeping.

I love '30 Rock.' Absolutely love it. It's a game-changing show.

Increasingly, it's actresses doing the big fashion advertising campaigns, and now there's no distinction between actresses and models.

I was brought up with a very strong sense of what can happen if your society starts to chip away at the small victories women have won for themselves.

If you are a 19-year-old woman, there are very specific things that directors and the people in positions of power in the industry - who tend to be older men - are going to want you to be and do. They are not going to want some chatty, difficult, slightly spoilt girl.

Motherhood so often comes in conflict with women's capacity to express and live their own lives.

I think it is kind of important to direct someone so the character is appealing, but, as an actress, I find it frustrating because I think, "Why do I have to be more likable than a man would have to be saying the same line?"

When you're on stage, you build strong relationships with the actors, but it's a story you tell with the audience - you have to include them, you have to respond to them, they have to understand the narrative.

I don't really want to play parts that I think are not fully developed or fleshed out, especially with female roles.

There are still journalists who risk their lives in situations of conflict, versus those who sit behind a desk at 'News of the World' to report on whether someone is going out with somebody or not.

I read the paper pretty much every day, as well as getting news from the Internet and on TV. But I don't do social media at all; I'm a Luddite from that point of view.

I want people to think I'm sexy, but to know also that I've got an ordinary body and not feel intimidated.

Normally, when you're working on something, there are other characters that you have alliances with, and you have unified goals with some characters.

We live in a society where children are expected to become adults overnight.

I love my home, spend as much time in London as I can, and try wherever possible to avoid travelling for work. Sometimes I think I'm really badly equipped to be an actress.

Films about women and their concerns are seen as frivolous, limited and, most damaging of all, niche.

If I have to spend prolonged periods of time in a trailer, I go mad. Stuck in a metal box doing nothing, I lie there paralysed with boredom.

If you have the opportunity as an actor to control your career in any way, then you've won the jackpot.

I'm fundamentally a busy person; I spend my time doing useful things and profoundly useless things!

I would argue that something dark is lurking between the sexes, and that it is seeping out into cinema.

Our conception of 1950s underwear is a lovely vintage aesthetic, but actually, wearing stockings with no elastic and a girdle was heavy duty.

I'm an actor. And like a lot of actors, it's very important that everybody loves you all the time.

I think it's very repressive for a woman to be constantly told that she has to make films about women to better represent women, but then the reverse is not found.

I don't really want to do things that I feel like are going to send out a message that I don't really want to sign up for.

If you read reviews that you think by their very nature are not respectful of the actresses involved or not appreciating the work as it should be, I think you should write to reviewers or comment and say, "Are you kidding me?"

There are American directors I'd really like to work with, but I don't know how much I want to be sitting in my house, doing the rounds of meetings with CEOs. You have to be really hardworking to do all that, and I'm lazy.

The advent of digitally enhancing images - and the fact that actresses weren't protesting against that - created an environment where big corporations felt like they had total ownership over the bodies of actresses.

I have always been interested in gender politics, so I'm not that keen on doing things that don't represent a truth about women.

I was mad until I was about 25. Completely out of control with my emotions. Everything that happened to me was a tragedy. I've been much happier over 25.

There was quite a lot of lying around in fields at Stonar, a small independent girls' school in the country near Bath. It was a non-selective school and the right environment for me: academically not particularly pushy.

I would love to live free of the fear and sadness and real desperation that I think the effect of childbirth has on women, especially because we are expected to be so concerned by 'recovery' from childbirth.

You don't have to conform to a very specific aesthetic today, whereas 1950s women definitely had to.

There's nothing very interesting about my life.

Women don't question themselves when they enter into a story that has male characters, but men do question the validity of a female narrative.

I think with the best actors, emotion is something that has no kind of check in them.

Female ambition is such a complicated thing to play because it is an aggressive quality, and people respond very badly to women exhibiting any kind of aggression.