People regardless of age are able to do a good job if they're inspired by the leader they work with.

There's a very small group of elite actresses who are my age, who people want to work with. It's not easy to get a good job with good actors.

I like to speak with more experienced people - with the staff, the manager - and get a lot of advice. But from a young age, I always remember that talent is good, but hard work beats talent.

We're stuck in the concrete age. Concrete has really become this ever-present material that's almost impossible to get away from. It's cheap, abundant, and easy to work with, and to an extent, that's good.

Particularly at around the age of 70 you reach a stage where you have to be very careful. If, at that point, you abandon the work you have been doing, there is a good chance that you will just collapse and drift.

What is the role of a public intellectual in the age of Twitter and soundbites? Is it to share your thoughts for the public good, or is it to curate the heaps of hate emails, tweets, and right-wing articles that trash your intellectual and social work?

You start at a young age, going on auditions, and you think you did a good job and expect to get that role, and you don't, and it's a letdown, a disappointment. So you tell yourself to just do the work and disconnect, because you have no control over the outcome.

I've seen pictures of myself with makeup on, and I look like those women who look like they're wearing makeup so they can look young, and I don't think that's good. They have all these products now called - wait, what's it called, it's my favorite - youth suppressant, or age go away; they don't work.

I remember that when I was in my 30s, a hot age for an actress, lots of offers were coming in, but nothing was great, and I didn't work for 18 months. It was at a really fruitful age, and I wanted to work. There was nothing coming down the pipeline that I thought was good - and then I got 'The Piano.'

By 2013, at the age of 29, I was failing. I had left two good jobs in succession to complete a novel I'd been tooling around with since 2009, had enrolled in a graduate programme in Texas, as far away from home as possible, to finish it - and yet: what did I have to show for it after five years of work?

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