And it's absolutely true that male sexual behavior and female responses to male demands change a lot when they start communicating - and the levels of the communication that I've seen on the ground in very, very poor areas are so high, and I think why don't we have that here?

— Emma Thompson

Any problem, big or small, within a family, always seems to start with bad communication. Someone isn't listening.

— Emma Thompson

Can he love her? Can the soul really be satisfied with such polite affections? To love is to burn - to be on fire, like Juliet or Guinevere or Eloise...

— Emma Thompson

Difficult for actors to extemporize in nineteenth-century English. Except for Robert Hardy and Elizabeth Springs, who speak that way anyway.

— Emma Thompson

Horror. I can't manage it. I become--well--horrified. Self-help books have a similar effect. When asked, "Any literary genre you simply can't be bothered with?" - (By the Book: Writers on Literature and the Literary Life from the NYT Book Review, by Pamela Paul)

— Emma Thompson

Hugh Laurie (playing Mr. Palmer) felt the line 'Don't palm all your abuses [of language upon me]' was possibly too rude. 'It's in the book,' I said. He didn't hit me.

— Emma Thompson

I ask Laurie if it's possible to get trained fish. Lindsay says this is how we know I've never produced a movie.

— Emma Thompson

I don't have technique because I never learned any.

— Emma Thompson

I don't mean being famous is a perk, because one knows that it's not necessarily a perk, but there are certain perks to being well-known and respected in one's field. Public perks. Like, I don't know, general friendliness and willingness to please, just to point out two.

— Emma Thompson

If you've got to my age, you've probably had your heart broken many times. So it's not that difficult to unpack a bit of grief from some little corner of your heart and cry over it.

— Emma Thompson