I think it’s the combination of the private part of writing, learning lines, editing. The creative dialogue with the self. The endlessness to it all. The nothingness of it all. But then the anticipation and later the contrast of performing it.

I guess I like to make sense of things in private, but I also like to make sense of things in public. There is something electric about both processes. And in both poetry and acting, I want to make the internal emotional world external.

A day in the garden with my family. Pottering around. Watering the vegetables, deadheading the roses. Or catching an early morning train, listening to music, writing into my ever-evolving PDF, making things.

I have a grand piano that my wonderful literary agent Clare Conville passed onto me. It was in her family for her whole childhood and when they were moving, we ended up with it. It lives in our music room. We’ve had many evenings of friends and family performing around it.

My Sicilian-style tuna spaghetti – lots of anchovies, salted capers and fresh tomatoes. An homage to my Italian ancestry.

I have quite a restless spirit. Sundays are usually spent painting the celling blue, moving the furniture around, re-wiring the lights.

The garden, walking, being on the move, songs, the paintings of Paula Rego, the poetry of Ted Hughes, the late Irish poet Niall McDevitt's ‘wandering lectures’ around London, his psychogeographic investigations into the poets who lived and died in the city.

August Blue for the immediate way Deborah Levy writes.

L’Hotel in Paris where Oscar Wilde’s spirit still lives on. It’s dark and circular. The bar has no windows or clocks. We went there recently for our 10-year anniversary. We stayed in the pink room.

River Cafe and the floating Chinese restaurant in Regents Park, which is called Feng Shang.

My husband Robert Montgomery. It is a joy to live in his world.

This Is The Sea by The Waterboys. Something about the reminder of the sea keeps me feeling sane.

Gena Rowlands. I love her unapologetic stare.

I’ve been lucky to have many but recently it has been my collaboration with the Italian avant-garde theatre and film director Riccardo Vannuccini. We've made two films together, Commedia and Things And Other Things, both times working with a translator.

Commedia was shot in Rome and Things and Other Things we made in Tuscany in November. The process of both films was entirely instinctive, and collaborative. Riccardo is taking his unique style of literary theatre into cinema, and that's very exciting to be a part of. 

Also my friendship and film work with the incredible filmmaker Jaclyn Bethany. She is a true force, a true artist. We have our new film that we made together coming in UK cinemas premiering at Curzon at the end of the month. It’s called Tell That To The Winter Sea. I'm from London and she is from Mississippi, but Jaclyn and I are kindred spirits.

I like making food that delights my family. I get great pleasure in making good food for them. But also from growing it. I’ve just planted in this years vegetables… and we have a big crop of winter garlic that's almost ready. Growing food I think connects us back to the earth in a way that we lost too much in the modern world.

I am happiest moving between the two. But I have really grown to enjoy a distance from the city. I like the feeling of being slightly on the outside of it all. I like the anonymity of the city, and I like the anonymity of countryside. Both for different reasons.

I am an early riser. I tend to wake up with the sun and go down with the sun.

I like to wear clothes that feel theatrical and romantic and lived in. I don’t mind taking on the cobwebs and burn marks of vintage things.

It’s a long white dress designed by Susie Cave for The Vampire's Wife with two white trailing bows on the front. I wore it for the film premiere of Commedia which was in Rome last year. I felt like a white swan in it.

Maybe a painter.