Top 90 Emma Thompson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Being disabled should not mean being disqualified from having access to every aspect of life.”

— Emma Thompson

2. “We all need somewhere where we feel safe.”

— Emma Thompson

3. “I think books are like people, in the sense that they’ll turn up in your life when you most need them.”

— Emma Thompson

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

— Emma Thompson

5. “I think books are like people, in the sense that they’ll turn up in your life when you most need them. I firmly believe there are books whose greatness actually enables you to live, to do something. And sometimes, human beings need story and narrative more than they need nourishment and food.”

— Emma Thompson

6. “Just write. It doesn’t matter what you write. Just sit at your desk and write.”

— Emma Thompson

7. “Piracy is our only option.”

— Emma Thompson

8. “Constantly worrying about your reflection and criticizing your body, shape and size is an act of violence against yourself.”

— Emma Thompson

9. “Its unfortunate and I really wish I wouldn’t have to say this, but I really like human beings who have suffered. They’re kinder.”

— Emma Thompson

10. “I am who I am, and there is nothing I can do about that.”

— Emma Thompson

11. “You can’t imagine what satisfaction can be gotten from throwing a pie into someone’s face.”

— Emma Thompson

12. “Without the ice, the earth will fall.”

— Emma Thompson

13. “My worst quality is impatience.”

— Emma Thompson

14. “The trouble with death is that there is no next.”

— Emma Thompson

15. “It’s not funny at all that we do all that advertising for children. Why is advertising for children allowed? What possible reason can there be for having those effing adverts on TV for all this crap that’s made by poor people in poor countries that we sell our children who have too much?”

— Emma Thompson

16. “I want a different world. One where I don’t wake up thinking I’m so lucky to be able to feed my daughter, and able to give people a clean drink of water. I don’t want images of starving babies at the breast in my mind. I want that to change. And if I want that, I had better do something about it.”

— Emma Thompson

17. “Marianne Dashwood looks at gray skies and sees blue. That’s all very well, and it’s not something you ever want entirely to lose. But you must lose a little of it; otherwise you’re going to get wet.”

— Emma Thompson

18. “When you buy Fairtrade products you can guarantee that the farmers who have worked hard to grow them get a minimum price. Fairtrade is a way of giving regular support – and enjoying delicious high quality foods at the same time.”

— Emma Thompson

19. “I’ve a problem with the word charity because I think that NGOs, as I prefer calling them, really do take the work of moral and social responsibilities that ought to be taken on by governments.”

— Emma Thompson

20. “I don’t think people understand that being poor means you have to work from dawn until dusk just to survive through the day. I think there’s some notion that poor people lie about all day not doing anything.”

— Emma Thompson

21. “Once you’re a mom, you’ve been split into two people. It’s like Peter Pan and his shadow.”

— Emma Thompson

22. “I think our hearts are very chemical and we change the way we see people according to how we feel about them. That’s what love is, in a way.”

— Emma Thompson

23. “But when I lose my temper, I find it difficult to forgive myself. I feel I’ve failed. I can be calm in a crisis, in the face of death or things that hurt badly. I don’t get hysterical, which may be masochistic of me.”

— Emma Thompson

24. “It’s such a cold night and it’s the only time I’ve actively been grateful for menopause. I’ve been entirely comfortable.”

— Emma Thompson

25. “Maybe I don’t take myself so seriously any more. And I don’t care how I’m judged. I’m past all that.”

— Emma Thompson

26. “The trick is to age honestly and gracefully and make it look great, so that everyone looks forward to it.”

— Emma Thompson

27. “We must remember that all these things, the nuances, the anomalies, the subtleties, which we assume only accessorize our days are in fact here for a much larger and nobler cause. They are here to save our lives.”

— Emma Thompson

28. “I Don’t Need the nicotene patch, Penny – I smoke cigarettes.”

— Emma Thompson

29. “The thing that influenced me most in relation to ‘Nanny McPhee’ were the Westerns I watched with my father. All the Spaghetti Westerns; all the Virginians; all the High Chaparrals. Because if you think about the form, it’s a stranger from out of town.”

— Emma Thompson

30. “Don’t ever go on a diet. Just don’t. Walk away. Diets are the spawn of Satan.”

— Emma Thompson

31. “My husband is here and I’d like to thank him, for many things, but first of all for pointing out that I had a big hole in my frock and then that my nipples were pointing in different directions. It’s good to have an expert there to help you with that sort of thing.”

— Emma Thompson

32. “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

33. “The Catholic Church – it’s so difficult because I don’t want say anything offensive but it makes me very angry that religious leaders from this faith have tried to respond negatively to sexual education and to the promotion of condom use.”

— Emma Thompson

34. “My appearance has changed a lot over the years, but it has far more to do with how I feel about being a woman.”

— Emma Thompson

35. “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

36. “A lot of very beautiful women can be a pain because all they’re thinking about is how they look.”

— Emma Thompson

37. “It’s not my fault that there is this gap between rich and poor, it is the fault of governments. I want a different world. One where I don’t wake up thinking I’m so lucky to be able to feed my daughter.”

— Emma Thompson

38. “I do think that despite my best efforts to resist it, I am now a grown-up. It’s due to lots of very difficult decisions that you make over a long period of time – about motherhood, wifehood, and work, and all the things that one has to make decisions about.”

— Emma Thompson

39. “Let’s stop feeling so guilty about global warming.”

— Emma Thompson

40. “And it’s absolutely true that male sexual behaviour 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

41. “Difficult for actors to extemporise in nineteenth-century English. Except for Robert Hardy and Elizabeth Spriggs, who speak that way anyway.”

— Emma Thompson

42. “Children are much more understanding of the suddenness and arbitrariness of death than we are. The old fairy tales contain a lot of that, and we’ve stolen from them, just as they stole from Greek myth, which has that same mixture of pre-Christian chaos.”

— Emma Thompson

43. “The films I’ve made for children have been my hardest work, my best, because kids deserve the best.”

— Emma Thompson

44. “I think that the Bible as a system of moral guidance in the 21st century is insufficient, to put it mildly. I feel quite strongly that we need a new moral lodestone if we can’t rely on what is inside our own selves. Which I think, actually, is pretty reliable.”

— Emma Thompson

45. “There is a painful difference between the expectation of an unpleasant event and its final certainty.”

— Emma Thompson

46. “Children don’t need much advice but they really do need to be listened to and not just with half an ear.”

— Emma Thompson

47. “I think people say you shouldn’t work with children or animals, but you must only work with children.”

— Emma Thompson

48. “There is that thing about not working with animals and children – I don’t think that’s true. Although you should never work with donkeys.”

— Emma Thompson

49. “We have to reinvest, I think, in the idea of articulacy as a form of personal human freedom and power.”

— Emma Thompson

50. “I have a nervous breakdown in the film and in one scene I get to stand at the top of the stairs waving an empty sherry bottle which is, of course, a typical scene from my daily life, so isn’t much of a stretch.”

— Emma Thompson