Top 100 Joanna Lumley Quotes

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

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #29944
#2. 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

Joanna Lumley Quotes #49192
#3. 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.

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #49336
#4. 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.

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #64076
#5. 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.

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #68693
#6. All you have to be is kind. That's all you need. Once you've got that, it virtually rules out everything else.

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #91349
#7. My grandmother is a famous atlas.

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #122104
#8. 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.

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #136351
#9. My great-great-great uncle - or maybe it's only two 'greats' - crossbred the first Aberdeen Angus.

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #142871
#10. 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

Joanna Lumley Quotes #186519
#11. 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.

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #191260
#12. 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

Joanna Lumley Quotes #228108
#13. I switch off lights like a maniac. I drive at reasonable speeds so that I don't waste petrol.

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #393025
#14. 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

Joanna Lumley Quotes #397876
#15. I don't feel like I am 66 at all. I feel more like I am 35. But I have a bus pass so it must be true.

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #413705
#16. 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?

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #439002
#17. You only have one go at life, which is thrilling. Only you can make yourself into who you want to be. Don't blame anybody else. You are entitled to free fresh air, and that's it. Do the rest yourself.

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #454630
#18. I would do anything to keep looking the job. I think you make an extra effort if you're on show.

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #456384
#19. The concept of Shwopping is so clever, I think. The idea is that every time someone goes shopping, they can take an unwanted item of clothing and pop it in the recycling bin in their M&S store for Oxfam.

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #467156
#20. I cut the labels out of my clothes because they scratch. Clothes are just little workhorses, aren't they?

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #484315
#21. I'm boiling about the rainforests being chopped down to make disposable chopsticks. I'm boiling about the fact that we have palm oil put into every single one of our substances.

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #529996
#22. 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!

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #530974
#23. The maddening thing is as actors of either sex, we get better as we get older, and so when you are 65, you think, 'I could play Juliet now. I understand it.'

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #549141
#24. 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

Joanna Lumley Quotes #584329
#25. I love a cardboard coffin. Both Mummy and Daddy went off in cardboard coffins, painted - Daddy's was rifle green. Beautifully made.

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #594269
#26. There is something so quiet and so industrious, something so Viking about the Scots.

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #595308
#27. I was once kissed on the lips by a giraffe, and I don't think I've ever got over it.

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #610168
#28. 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.

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #626011
#29. I find it a great antidote ... lipstick and mirrors and hairspray.

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #638015
#30. 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.

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #639135
#31. 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.

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #645805
#32. 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.

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #659603
#33. If your family loves you, you're fine. What you can't grow up without is love.

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #678295
#34. 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.

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #679393
#35. Sure, good things can go badly wrong. Nevertheless, there's always another day.

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #687442
#36. 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.

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #713677
#37. 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.

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #715085
#38. 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

Joanna Lumley Quotes #736780
#39. As soon as you reach a certain age, you're thrown onto a kind of mental scrap heap.

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #753277
#40. 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.

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #756459
#41. I'm a pathetic haggler and often give more than the original price out of a misplaced sense of duty.

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #844888
#42. I never wanted to go to university: books seemed to have all the answers, and the questions, too. I went to work for Jean Muir as her in-house model. Miss Muir - as she will always be to me - was interested in everything.

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #856683
#43. If the Gurkhas can't live in Britain, then I don't want to, either.

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #881206
#44. NASA space scientists have been studying giraffe skin so they can apply what they learn from it to the construction of spacesuits.

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #886678
#45. I've never felt the constraints of social acceptability.

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #898141
#46. I think most of the world would like to be Scottish. All the Americans who come here never look for English blood or Welsh, only for Scottish and Irish. It's understandable. The Scots effectively created the face of the modern world: the railways, the bridges, the tunnels.

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #911023
#47. Nobody tells you Rwanda looks like Tuscany with its tiled roofs.

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #914821
#48. 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

Joanna Lumley Quotes #931802
#49. 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.

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #950902
#50. I can't see any difference in having your hair dyed, your teeth fixed, your nose done, or your face smoothed out or lifted.

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #968926
#51. 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.

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #983063
#52. Ah, Scotland. I am three-parts Scottish and terribly proud of it, although maybe we should divide it into eighths, because my two-eighths are Danish and English, the Lumley part. But the bulk of the rest of me is Scottish - and Scottish ministers especially.

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #1002725
#53. I'd been a Bond girl and in Dracula films and 'Coronation Street,' but I was always hunting for work. After 'The New Avengers,' I never had to wait for work again.

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #1003323
#54. 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

Joanna Lumley Quotes #1019025
#55. 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.

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #1021465
#56. When you're young, you think life is forever, but it's finite. I'm 68, so even by the maddest measurements, I'm in the last bit of life.

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #1026071
#57. I've never been interested enough to have a career trajectory. I've never had any ambition or thought of what I should be doing or had any idea of what I'd like to do. Never. And still don't. And if something comes along, I say 'Fine.'

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #1031573
#58. 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

Joanna Lumley Quotes #1042978
#59. 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

Joanna Lumley Quotes #1078690
#60. I'm not terribly good at three-page recipes - I tend to skip bits - or anything that involves marinating things in juniper berries.

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #1093095
#61. That's the staggering, humorous thing about money. If you haven't got taste, money doesn't matter: You'll always look ghastly.

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #1102404
#62. 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.

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #1103167
#63. The Treorchy Male Choir's version of "Myfanwy" is one of the most glorious things I've ever heard in all my long life. Love and congratulations to you all.

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #1130038
#64. 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

Joanna Lumley Quotes #1138931
#65. I'm aware of my body.

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #1163788
#66. 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.

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #1181197
#67. I'm three quarters Scottish, but I sound English. I don't really see British as a race.

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #1181319
#68. If you haven't understood that if you are born you die, you scarcely deserve to be able to be alive.

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #1205589
#69. 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

Joanna Lumley Quotes #1208277
#70. 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

Joanna Lumley Quotes #1282458
#71. I am mean as cats' meat about handbags: mine don't ever look chic. I always prefer bags that aren't made of leather.

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #1296274
#72. 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

Joanna Lumley Quotes #1302316
#73. I cut my hair myself and colour it. I know everybody in the hairdressing business despairs of me, but it's so much easier to do it yourself.

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #1319719
#74. 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

Joanna Lumley Quotes #1327054
#75. 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.

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #1359367
#76. 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.

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #1376424
#77. 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.

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #1383268
#78. 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

Joanna Lumley Quotes #1395848
#79. Film work is hard work. It's long days, and quite often quite dismaying locations you have to be in.

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #1427749
#80. 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?'

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #1498466
#81. It's an incredibly difficult thing to bring a giraffe down. They can kill a lion with a single blow from their feet.

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #1500092
#82. I hate the hand that comes out of a car and just drops litter in the street. I hate that! For some reason, it just fills me with fury! It's just utter laziness, lack of interest in other people, lack of interest in the planet, in the hedgehog who might eat the plastic bag, it's a lack of concern.

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #1523975
#83. 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!

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #1526846
#84. 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

Joanna Lumley Quotes #1540415
#85. I have a toy giraffe on my bed. I've got photographs over my desk as well as a mask of a giraffe in my kitchen. I am totally hooked.

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #1575489
#86. I haven't got a very sweet tooth, but I love salted things like nuts. I would have to be dragged in by a lorry if I ate as many salted peanuts as I would like to.

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #1614530
#87. I prefer not to eat food that has a face.

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #1619187
#88. I don't think men are that attracted by glamour. I think women are attracted by glamour. I think men are attracted by a sense of friendship.

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #1629040
#89. I admire politicians. It is a really tough assignment, and I would fall at the first fence.

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #1635719
#90. 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.

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #1660333
#91. 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.

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #1669041
#92. 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.

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #1678311
#93. 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?

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #1688121
#94. 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.

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #1724202
#95. 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

Joanna Lumley Quotes #1743820
#96. 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.

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #1789117
#97. 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

Joanna Lumley Quotes #1818359
#98. 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

Joanna Lumley Quotes #1839463
#99. 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.

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #1845047
#100. The press have given me affairs I've never had and killed a few I did have. After a while, you learn.

Joanna Lumley

Joanna Lumley Quotes #1866507

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