A lot of dramas get a bad name commercially because they are unremittingly bleak.

I find that after a screening, people really want to come and tell you what they feel.

I think English film is very embarrassed by patriotism, generally.

I began to think that if you're a stutterer, it's about inhabiting silence, emptiness, and nothingness.

I think directors can become overly infatuated by gilt and gold, and the word "lavish" and everything being magnificent.

I think the thumb print on the throat of many people is childhood trauma that goes unprocessed and unrecognized.

The irony of a director going to film festivals is you never get to see any of the films.

American cinema tends to express a patriotic relationship to national identity on a regular basis.

Great acting is all about being in the moment, being in the present tense.

I decided to be a filmmaker when I was 12. I had utter clarity that this would be my life.

A British villain never loses their sense of humour.

You can't understand European history at all other than through religion, or English literature either if you can't recognise biblical allusions.

The glory of each generation is to make its own precedents.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

One would hope, as well that intimacy would leave more of a mark, that more of it would remain. But it doesn’t. You just end up thinking, who is this person?

Enlightenment is a direct experience with reality.

People are always giving you credit for really wanting to say more than you said.

The difficulty of tactical maneuvering consists in turning the devious into the direct, and misfortune into gain.

People take what they need from the stories they hear. The tale is often wiser than the teller.

Rome is the one great spiritual organisation which is able to resist and must, as a matter of life and death, the progress of science and modern civilization

When people lack teachers, their tendencies are not corrected; when they do not have ritual and moral principles, then their lawlessness is not controlled.