What's taken God 200 years to create was wiped out in a couple of days by what was apparently an arsonist, And it just shows you what a sick world we live in nowadays.

I spent a lot of years just learning my craft and falling down in front of the camera.

Most of my career up until the last couple of years has basically been a training ground for me. Actors that came up in the '50s and '60s, they had the theater, and television was in its infancy.

I've been on the road for four years. I won't recognise the place again, until I walk out on stage.

I have been hunted for twenty-one years. I have literally lived in the saddle. I have never known a day of perfect peace.

A few years ago, I thought, I'll never make it. I started to go to the doctor to help me lose weight.

When I'm performing for the people, I am me, then. I am that little girl who, when she was five years old, used to sing at church. Or I'm that 15-year-old young lady who wanted to be grown and wanted to sing and couldn't wait to be smokin' a cigarette, you know?

This is an album of songs that I've always loved, tunes that I heard. For the first time in 53 years of recording, I really had control over an entire album, start to finish.

Now I can stand up on the stage again like I used to after five years of sitting down while I sang.

It is over one hundred years since the abolition of slavery. The Negro people in the United States have taken plenty and they have reached a stage where they have decided that they are not going to take any more.

A building is hard to judge. It takes many years to find out whether it works. It's not as simple as asking the people in the office whether they like it.

During the first 10 years of my life, while my parents were married, I enjoyed a privileged upbringing. After their divorce, my life was difficult.

I am not just a celebrity, I'm a human-rights advocate for the last 20 years.

But inspiration? - That's when you come home from abroad and are asked: Well, have you found inspiration? - and fortunately you haven't. But the impressions sink in, of course, and may emerge later: None of us has invented the house; that was done many thousands of years ago.

What was so good about it was that the set that they originally built stayed there, and weathered over the five years. It got five summers and five winters of weather. It became more and more authentic as we worked in it, and they added bits to it.