Top 100 Joanna Lumley Quotes
#1. Me? As England's answer to Jonah Lomu? Joanna Lumley, more likely.
Damian Hopley
#2. If I sounded like Joanna Lumley, I'd never shut up!
Michele Deppe
#3. That's nice, to be compared to Joanna Lumley. She played my mother once in 'Ella Enchanted.' I was one of the ugly sisters, and she was the stepmother, so that was great. I'll take that comparison, thank you.
Lucy Punch
#5. I've never felt the constraints of social acceptability.
Joanna Lumley
#6. I am blessed beyond the realms of blessedness, and easily the greatest pleasure is giving it away
Joanna Lumley
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. Nobody tells you Rwanda looks like Tuscany with its tiled roofs.
Joanna Lumley
#26. 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
#27. 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.
Joanna Lumley
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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.
Joanna Lumley
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. Buy an atlas and keep it by the bed - remember you can go anywhere.
Joanna Lumley
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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.
Joanna Lumley
#38. Film work is hard work. It's long days, and quite often quite dismaying locations you have to be in.
Joanna Lumley
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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.
Joanna Lumley
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. If you haven't understood that if you are born you die, you scarcely deserve to be able to be alive.
Joanna Lumley
#51. I'm three quarters Scottish, but I sound English. I don't really see British as a race.
Joanna Lumley
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. I cut the labels out of my clothes because they scratch. Clothes are just little workhorses, aren't they?
Joanna Lumley
#55. 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
#56. I would do anything to keep looking the job. I think you make an extra effort if you're on show.
Joanna Lumley
#57. 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
#58. 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.
Joanna Lumley
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. I switch off lights like a maniac. I drive at reasonable speeds so that I don't waste petrol.
Joanna Lumley
#63. 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
#64. I have never had anything done to my face because then you end up looking as they all do in America. Look at Judi Dench: she would never be as good if she had had work done.
Joanna Lumley
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. My great-great-great uncle - or maybe it's only two 'greats' - crossbred the first Aberdeen Angus.
Joanna Lumley
#68. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. I've always used my hair for whatever it is needed for. I had it an inch long and jet black for a Pinter play I did. Changes you completely.
Joanna Lumley
#77. 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
#78. If the Gurkhas can't live in Britain, then I don't want to, either.
Joanna Lumley
#79. 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
#80. I'm a pathetic haggler and often give more than the original price out of a misplaced sense of duty.
Joanna Lumley
#81. I think handbags, not so much clothes anymore, but I think you can tell a fashion victim by their handbag.
Joanna Lumley
#82. 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!
Joanna Lumley
#83. 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
#84. As soon as you reach a certain age, you're thrown onto a kind of mental scrap heap.
Joanna Lumley
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. Sure, good things can go badly wrong. Nevertheless, there's always another day.
Joanna Lumley
#89. NASA space scientists have been studying giraffe skin so they can apply what they learn from it to the construction of spacesuits.
Joanna Lumley
#90. If your family loves you, you're fine. What you can't grow up without is love.
Joanna Lumley
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. I find it a great antidote ... lipstick and mirrors and hairspray.
Joanna Lumley
#95. 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
#96. I was once kissed on the lips by a giraffe, and I don't think I've ever got over it.
Joanna Lumley
#97. There is something so quiet and so industrious, something so Viking about the Scots.
Joanna Lumley
#98. I love a cardboard coffin. Both Mummy and Daddy went off in cardboard coffins, painted - Daddy's was rifle green. Beautifully made.
Joanna Lumley
#99. 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
#100. 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
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