Learning is the most important thing, no mater how you do it, or where you do it, or who you do it with.
The written word can be powerful and beautiful - but films transport us to another place in a way that even the most evocative words never can.
My name means freedom in Irish.
Everyone thinks I'm ethereal. But I'm not like that, you know. I'm not ethereal. Well, I might have a little bit of that quality to me, that 'old soul' thing, but I'm not ethereal.
I think that when you're an actress, you have to think about what kind of a role model you're going to be. I hope that I'm a good role model for young girls. I'm not going to, if people still want me in their movies, I don't want to be one of these girls who goes around partying every night and is in rehab. I don't want to do that.
I like my characters to be ones I think about long after I've finished reading the script.
Acting is one of these things that I can't really describe - it's just like, why do you love your mum and dad? You know, you just do.
I think it's important that we have strong, female characters in movies now, which can really leave an impression on people - especially young people - and that they're not 'sexy' or 'cool'.
I try as best as I can to have a normal life. People recognise you, of course, and that's very strange. But I sort of leave my working life behind when I go home. That's my other world.
I think acting is something that is within you. It's a very natural thing for me. It comes from myself, really.
I think I do believe in the afterlife; I have heard stories from people who I can completely trust that have seen ghosts.
That's what acting is. You're pretending to be someone else.
I've never really felt like I was a child actor. Just an actor who happened to be quite young.
It's too distracting to read about yourself. You want to be perfect and you want everyone to love you, and that's never going to happen.
What we do every St. Patty's day, which is wear green and drink a lot of Guinness. And maybe cry a little bit and laugh, and everyone will have to sing a song. That's how every funeral, christening, and wedding ends up in Ireland. Everyone ends up having to sing a song by the end of it.
Once you move away from home, it's never quite the same again. You expect everything to be just as you left it, and it never is. It's almost the first step into adulthood, realising you've got to make your own way.
I will always have a child in me. That is what Pete Jackson has got, what a lot of the directors I have worked with have. It is about knowing how to have fun and that is something I always want to hold on to.
When I was younger, I would mess about and have a laugh with everyone. I was doing Atonement when I was about 12, and as we went to do this very serious scene, the director Joe [Wright] came up to me ... I'd been giggling right up to the beginning of the take. And he came up to me and said, "Okay, you need to be serious now." I completely idolized him.
The 1916 uprising was kind of the most important rebellion in Ireland's fight for independence that had been going on for 700 years. So it's a very important moment in history for us.
I don't think you could get anything worse than losing a child. I think if my child died, I would prefer it if I were dead.
I love cleaning. I love mopping the floor. If you need your floor mopped, I'm there.
I saw 'Clueless' probably when I was about 8 or 9 years old. And, I had certain films that I would fall asleep so it was 'Clueless' for quite a long time, and I used to just watch it every single night and knew every single line, every single quote.
I've always been quite an active person especially when I was younger. When I was in primary school, I used to play lots of sports. I was a sprinter and I did basketball and swimming and Gaelic football and things like that. So I always thought, I guess, that it would be fun to incorporate that much physical activity and work into a dramatic piece.
'Romeo And Juliet' is the classic love story. When two lovers are separated and trying to get back to one another, that's fiercely romantic and something you become glued to.
I appreciate the written word and spoken word more, but Atonement sort of established so much of me. It was a character that didn't really speak, and I found that a lot of the roles I was gravitating toward after that were kind of nonverbal.
