Top 80 Quotes & Sayings by Dervla Kirwan

Now it comes to this stage of my career when I get to play the wicked witch all the time. You know you start off with Cinderella and then you end up playing the stepmothers.

I've been very lucky with having a run of working with very special people and it just makes you work harder.

I've made a lot of mistakes in my career but the biggest mistake I've made is to turn down work.

I never discuss my troubles in a relationship. It's best to just keep those thoughts to yourself.

I want to interact creatively with the directors I work with - it's a thrilling way to work.

Obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) runs in my family, as do other mental health problems.

Because I don't live there anymore, I've fallen in love with London again.

I can be a totally different person from one day to the next, so it is difficult for me to stay in one role over a prolonged period.

I'd much rather go for a long walk than spend an hour in the gym.

Since I was 15 I've lived in fear that I'd never work again.

I didn't grow up reading magazines; I was very much in an environment where that would have been deemed trivial, frivolous.

I was a waitress at a really rundown Italian restaurant in Dublin, for about a week, at 16. I thought it was going to be romantic - overhearing affairs and watching first-time couples all loved up. But instead I was just running about constantly.

I don't have a great relationship with food.

I'm not a football fan, and not remotely interested in it.

David Attenborough's 'Life' series is phenomenal. He's a wonderful modern soothsayer.

My mother was a woman of the '50s who had a family in the '70s while finding her political and feminist voice. She could make marvellous three-course meals after teaching all day but hated it. Because of that legacy, it took me a long time to realise the delights of the family table.

I was pregnant with my first child and so gloriously happy. I felt fecund and powerful.

I've no desire to be away from my family for 16 hours a day.

I will always worry about where my career is going and am I any good.

Ballykissangel' made me a household name, and I am enormously grateful for that, but I don't feel it would ever have developed me into a better actress had I stayed.

As long as you're chasing something, that keeps you alive, right?

I mean, the human race wouldn't continue if anyone told you how hard it is having kids, would it?

Los Angeles is not going to be a big naive step for me. I know it's tough out there, but I do think there's a place for Irish actors in that market.

I am concerned that there's a cavalier attitude to the Irish Peace Process. What poor memories some have; I remember only too well the bag searches, the bomb scares and deaths. As they say, history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes.

I take the kids horse riding every weekend at Quob Stables - the people there are lovely.

The main thing I've done for my children is not to give them a stupid name, like actors do.

I watched 'Lagerfeld Confidential,' which was such an insight into the daily life of a maverick designer.

I ate ostrich. I'm not very proud of it. I was going through a very experimental period and probably during foot and mouth. It was exquisite, but I felt very guilty.

I'd never scan the starters and main courses on a menu in a restaurant as a child. I'd want a dessert for starter, for main course and for dessert.

I think I've got some actor's form of ADHD. I just can't do the same thing day in, day out.

I really want to work with Mike Leigh.

It's a collective experience when you're making TV. You think of all the people who work hard to make this extraordinary and you just hope that it works well.

I don't want to be known as 'oh, Dervla, when she's on stage she's very good but she's terribly dreary', or 'another heavy night with Kirwan.'

I never read the good press and never read the bad press. If you believe the good press you're finished. If you believe the bad press, you won't be able to continue.

It does annoy me when I walk into a room and there are six men over the age of 40 with, let's just say, a major gut problem, and they're saying 'hang on there Dervla, don't eat your chocolate cake at dessert.'

Getting pregnant proved to be a hell of a shock but it's really exciting.

My favourite designers are Stella McCartney, Balenciaga, Karl Lagerfeld, Chanel and Givenchy, but I wish I had loads of money to spend on them.

Growing up, I wanted blond hair.

Yeah, I talk to everyone. I think that's the secret, you know. Keep it friendly, keep it warm. People just want to connect, don't they, at the end of the day?

When I look at a magazine and I see Kate Winslet, I will buy it because Kate lends it a sense of achievement: she is brilliant, sexy, a mother.

Spending time away from family during filming, I think, for every working mum is always difficult. But it has to be done; there's no way round it you've just got to do it.

I am quite a mercurial person.

It makes a lot of people cringe, the idea of being a team player.

Sometimes, people are attracted to each other without knowing what or why or when it happens.

I'm not a religious person at all.

I feel better now at 38 then I did when I was 17. But then, when I was 17 I did have the attitude of a 40 year-old.

My parents have a brilliant ear for languages and mimicry and accents, which I think I've inherited - that I can listen to things and pick them up.

I'm obviously slightly ill, because there is a burning desire to be perfect in me. It's probably the Catholic, or the ex-Catholic in me.

I just love being in the middle of nowhere.

A lot of actresses say they are 24 when they are 34 but I find that ridiculous. I wish we didn't succumb to the youth-is-all ideology in this industry, because there is a huge audience out there who want to relate to characters of their own age played by actors of their own age.

There's a difference between loneliness and solitude. You pursue solitude, I think. But loneliness is a completely different isolating thing.

I am very scatty, I don't follow things through, I forget things. I am not perfect.

Who hasn't had an argument with their mother-in-law?

I was always quite mature as a child and as I get older I'm regressing.

There's still, dare I say it, a cultural propaganda against the Irish, that we are, as women, 'feisty.' I hate that word.

My kids will never need a bodyguard because they'll have me.

I am all for high art but I owe it to myself to be clever about it and do commercial things too.

True Dare Kiss' is a gothic drama about a highly dysfunctional Mancunian family who, after 20 years, reconvene for the funeral of their father. I wanted to play Phil because I really liked the character, and there is an element of mystery about her - which I can't reveal.

The actor's job is to put themselves in the shoes of the character they are trying to portray as truthfully as possible.

I'm a terrible cook but I wish I wasn't.