Best Madly, Deeply: The Diaries Of Alan Rickman Quotes by Alan Rickman

"Quiet pleasure of preparing food for friends."

"The horror of walking into this small room. Important to do something. Doesn’t matter what. Just something."

"How do you cram that book into a movie? Maybe he has… I don’t know."

"Christmas morning is always a favourite time."

"An extraordinary evening is completed with 100mph dash back with Giofreddo the cab driver and dancing in the square."

"Livingstone, Skinner et al. are wrong because they spend their lives so consumed by politics they cannot put their fingers truly to the wind."

"It seems sometimes to be in the stars that some days are peaceful and some are manic."

"Maybe today a corner was turned and for that I guess I’m grateful in the middle of all this shite."

"The most beautiful day. Blue, clear skies and clean hard sunshine."

"Arrive home, switch on BBC2—Pina Bausch. The Real Thing."

"Watching South Africa put up new flags and crawl over the trip wires and out of the tunnel."

"Breathtaking is a word that gets slung about, but here it’s apt."

"Never say this is off the record, someone will use it anyway."

"Listening to casting problems, rehearsal problems, photograph problems. There is a point at which they walk away stronger and you are exhausted. This cannot be right."

"Sometimes the sensation of being a personal launderette service—friendship must not become a space for indulgence."

"The very definition of ‘you must be joking’."

"Sweeping up leaves is good therapy for almost everything."

"The walls we are surrounded by—the objects we fill the spaces with—the lives they all describe."

"I don’t know what I become under these circumstances—a kind of amorphous bundle of past and present."

"You can’t be passive—the audience has to work a bit."

"A sense not so much of death, but of what life is, because of its extraordinary absence."

"The trouble with this job is that you can watch yourself & your friends growing older in full color, close up."

"The truth is, I have been stroked a lot for four days but not by someone I love."

"The murderer was also five years old once. Look at him and look at the photos of the children."

"I just wish this had not extended even to the immaculate hairdos of all the inmates."

"Sometimes you don’t know the end of the sentence upon which you have just embarked. Scary."

"But the contrast to all the glitter of yesterday makes both seem aimless."

"Which other mother takes 2 of them river rafting in Idaho?"

"It's like having a band of cheerleaders, all tapping away into the night."

"We should all be engaged in an activity which ‘gives away’. Here, too much is ‘on show’."

"The Greenes. This breathtaking house, every corner filled with effortless taste and abundant eccentricity."

"The cook quit at 5pm. Hat, bag, case, the lot."

"Sean handles rehearsals beautifully. Honest, fun, denying the power of his role."

"I can’t direct unless you show me something."

"Somewhere around 6.25… Sean comes in, looking wired. He doesn’t drink but I found myself looking at his can of orange juice wondering about the effect of carbonated water."

"I’m not breathing properly and not drinking enough water."

"George Harrison there trying to find a corner, anywhere but the middle of the room at, God forbid, a party."

"The odd moment of peace in Tuscany. Like living in a watershed."

"Harder than changing the world is changing yourself."
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"This is like a film set. Nothing seems real."

"Silence lends not disenchantment but maybe internal rhythms change."

"It’s even felt at one remove—re Sigourney being treated appallingly by Harvey Weinsteineinsteineinstein. So now I want to punish him."

"I am currently at odds with everything, it seems."

"Never trust a man with two-day growth, who also stuffs his face that much."

"Enjoyable voyeurism and Helen MirrenMirrenMirren really wonderful."

"The fear of success creating the circumstances of failure. That has to stop."

"Home somewhere around 3.30am from Richard’s party in the Royal Suite at Claridge’s."

"The British electorate proving yet again that they never vote for anything."

"The desire to eat and even more get a drink is matched only by the need to bang the 3 Davids’ heads against the nearest wall."

"I felt a kind of euphoric relief in amongst the usual barrage of self-criticism."

"Who cares about his little tantrums—come out from behind the hair & glasses and showy walk and witless rudeness."

"I’m sure you’re tired of answering this—but what happened?"

"The casual cruelty of it is, of course, Byronesque."

"At which I thought we reached a kind of understanding about Act 3."

"One does not so much act with her as against her."

"The show—if I can do it with this tight band around my head, I can do it anywhere."

"Fi—you have to go, and tell Fiach tomorrow."

"We will never climb it—the summit will never arrive."

"We are free TV with ads, trading on an embarrassingly repetitive and needy emptiness."

"The play and its language start to come through."

"It’s not until later that I realise my own agent has managed to say almost nothing about my work."

"Anticipation or hindsight—no one should have to do a play like this twice in one day."

"On the way home, a visit—forced—to Dean Street Tesco. What a dump this chain is."

"The sense of where this will go becomes greater as the run ends."

"Something colder and maybe more useful gripped my heart today."

"It would help not to start the play at the back of the stage and then play much of Act 2 facing upstage."

"You have to hide the beast, not let it possess you."

"How can I curb this ability to distance and intimidate?"

"I show her my groundplan sketches. Immediately, she has plans for sweeping her own path on stage."

"Everything they say is right—he was ahead of his time, his music is wonderful, and his self-possession humbling."

"Sitting in the Lipsync lobby glancing to the TV screen behind the reception desk."

"I can now feel the film having a life of its own and I alternate between wanting it finished, magically, tomorrow and wanting to sit there for 24 hours straight."

"Somewhere in the afternoon miking-up went on for a scene he had no lines in—OK, but how about some consulting with the 3 other actors?"

"Finished at around 6pm. Could think only of hot bath. In pain from ankles to eyelids."

"In the bar, afterwards, rage boiled over and in the face of the Sphinx smile too much—probably—truth. Or not enough. Could be a Waterloo."

"Now it has graduated to nausea. The diary of this production should be sent to The Lancet..."

"Occasionally a burst of clarity but an overwhelming sense of surviving, not enriching."

"Mike Nichols has died. He had looked suddenly frail... 'He was responsible for igniting people’s dreams.' And he joyously kept that flame alight in so many."

"Walking back from First Beach to Fourth Beach... But the sea just kept doing absolutely its own thing. We are specks in its eye."

"The resistance, of course, is to being devoured by the Establishment."

"Finding letters that should not have been so long lost. Seeing a shape—a shape punctuated by big decisions and leaps into the dark."

"It feels like a mistake, that we were all there talking about her... you feel as if some people in life should be excused..."

"This _A Little Chaos_ is the kind of work I make. If I am to be disallowed then—I just stop."

"I feel like we grew up together. She was the best of us, but standing next to The Beatles."

"Apart from Streisand reminding me what a great actress she is, I was hooked by the craft of William Wyler—his pacing and cutting, just nudging you along by a finger, or a hand or a wrist."

"Horrifying to realise that so much stuff just gathers itself around you, especially if you have as much storage as we have."