I always listen to music, my passion and vice is music, I will be denied access to heaven because of the number of CDs I own, and I have gluttony for all types and colours of music.

I have always believed that there is a need for life-affirming films.

You know, you lose a lot of social skills if you’re a writer. You spend too long alone. And it’s forced me to address that.

Once you start to realize that a film is the sum of its editing, then editing is the thing you're always looking at.

The feeling of not belonging, of not being entirely worthy, of being sometimes hostage to your own sensibilities. Those things speak to me very personally.

My grandmother was a huge influence on me and the fact that there was this very strong, rather formidable presence of women in my life has been an enormous value.

The only lesson to extract from any civil war is that it's pointless and futile and ugly, and that there is nothing glamorous or heroic about it. There are heroes, but the causes are never heroic.

Look at it this way: if you write the novel of 'Cold Mountain,' it costs exactly the same to produce and market as a novel set in a room. If you make the film, the disparity of costs is huge.

No studio in Hollywood wanted 'Cold Mountain.' None. No one wanted 'Ripley,' no one wanted 'The English Patient.' That tells you there isn't really an appetite for ambitious movie-making out there.

I don't hold with the notion that only bad books make good movies.

[Abbas Kiarostami] is a great artist and a poet. I sometimes think that if Samuel Beckett made films, he'd make them like Kiarostami makes them.

I'd trade every last one of you for a moment's peace and a dog that didn't P on the carpet

The internet is now a forum for public prosecution.

Nobody was interested in playing Bob Marley on the radio. We had to tour him - that was the only way it could work.

It is, I suppose, the business of grandparents to create memories and the relative of memories: traditions. We want to lodge moments, like snapshots, in the fleeting video of time.

As the feminist saying goes, 'Women deliver.' In other words, when women control resources, the social gain is greater than when men control resources.

Music has the power to unite us. It proves that by working together, we can create something truly beautiful.

but I felt as if I’d just been Photoshopped out of my own book cover. And if there was one thing I wasn’t used to, it was being ignored

A great part of this life consists in contemplating what we cannot cure.

There are strange moments in life when the mind rests without any kind of worries. When our mind is quiet, when our mind is in silence, then the new arrives.

Ask what Time is, it is nothing else but something of eternal duration become finite, measurable and transitory.