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Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Joanna Lumley Quotes

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

– Joanna Lumley

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.

– Joanna Lumley

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.

– Joanna Lumley

Our bodies will be recycled one way or another, but what about our ideas and minds and characters? Primordial soup? The bourne from which no traveller returns? Interesting and exciting.

– Joanna Lumley

There was one ‘crime’ during the whole time I was at school, when a fountain pen went missing. Stealing just didn’t happen. I was taught not to shoplift, not to steal, not to behave badly. We weren’t even allowed to drop litter.

– Joanna Lumley

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

– Joanna Lumley

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

– Joanna Lumley

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

– Joanna Lumley

In Kenya you’ve got the great birds and monkeys leaping through the trees overhead. It’s a chance to remember what the world is really like.

– Joanna Lumley

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.

– Joanna Lumley

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.

– Joanna Lumley

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.

– Joanna Lumley

I can’t cut out a piece of cloth and make a lovely dress, but I can mend tears in shirts and sew on buttons.

– Joanna Lumley

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.

– Joanna Lumley

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.

– Joanna Lumley

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.

– Joanna Lumley

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.

– Joanna Lumley

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.

– Joanna Lumley

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

– Joanna Lumley

It’s not often you get to hang out with someone you’re really intrigued by. So when Will.i.am invited me to visit him at home, I couldn’t resist.

– Joanna Lumley

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

– Joanna Lumley

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.

– Joanna Lumley

I’ve looked forward to being older because you will have that many more miles covered. We mustn’t be led into thinking getting old is bad. Growing old is good.

– Joanna Lumley

I’ve got lots of good friends. I could have affairs. I can read a book all night, put the cat on the end of the bed. I can pick up my passport and go to France. I don’t have to ask anybody.

– Joanna Lumley

I’ve had my run-ins with department stores, like Harrods, which stopped selling fur coats, but I found some there with fur trim, which is just as disgusting. Foie gras production is appalling – there’s no excuse for selling it.

– Joanna Lumley

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.

– Joanna Lumley

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.

– Joanna Lumley

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

– Joanna Lumley

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.

– Joanna Lumley

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.

– Joanna Lumley

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