54 Quotes by Vanessa Redgrave

Upon accepting her Oscar for "Julia," 1978: "My dear colleagues, I thank you very very much for this tribute to my work. I think that Jane Fonda and I have done the best work of our lives, and I salute you and I pay tribute to you, and I think you should.

We will always want films ... that basically are centred on young people, because young people is the way we live on, we older people, insofar as we live on.

What I didn't understand was that the personal and the political go together. I felt at the time I had to sacrifice my children's present for their future. It seemed an either/or. I didn't realise that by being with one's own children I would have had a better understanding of the ones who are not my own. I was thinking of them but I didn't spend the time that they needed from me. It's a tribute to them that they came out so well.

I was surprised when I was asked to play Miss Daisy and wondered if I could – only in part because she was Jewish but, also because she was a Southern woman who has hardly opened her mouth before she declares she's not prejudiced, and yet everything she does shows how totally prejudiced she is.

As a mother you have got to have a view for now and a view for the future.

The great writers like Chekhov know that tragedy and laughter are just a few steps from each other ... but it took me a long time as an actress to learn that. Actually Arthur Miller taught me in the Seventies. We were making a CBS TV drama of his play Playing for Time about Auschwitz but the characters were laughing. It was a big insight for me to realise that that was what's called gallows humour, in this case worse than the gallows, that humans need to laugh and make jokes in order to survive.

Theater helps people keep sane.

The stage is actor's country. You have to get your passport stamped every so often or they take away your citizenship.

The arts stop society going rotten and mad.