I'm a really judgmental person, and it just dumbs everything down. It doesn't create any room for interrogation or investigation.

Try and withhold your judgment, because as soon as you think you know something, you're shutting down.

Every film you do, you always look at it and you think, "I could do better," but I'm never going to tell people what I could do better. I think it's up to them to make up their own mind.

The biggest challenge was to make sure that we are looking at things honestly and truthfully. We weren't making an apologist film. That was the toughest part.

I studied fascism when I was at university. My husband's family are German Jews. I'm very close to his grandma and she left Berlin when she was 19 in 1937. So, it's kind of all around me.

You flourish one hushed breath at a time. Imagine all you can build word by single word.

I don't know what folk music means anymore, because the meaning of that just keeps changing.

...I have come to make distinctions between what I call the academy and literature, the moral equivalents of church and God. The academy may lie, but literature tries to tell the truth.

Being a mother is a noble status, right? Right. So why does it change when you put 'unwed' or 'welfare' in front of it?

There's no perfect [date]. There's no agenda which has to be fulfilled. So really it's about the company and how well you get along.

People might love themselves with the most entire and unbounded affection, and yet be extremely miserable.

Perfectionism is not a quest for the best. It is a pursuit of the worst in ourselves, the part that tells us that nothing we do will ever be good enough - that we should try again.

Every social organisation which is rooted in life still lasts a long time, even after the conditions from which it drew its strength have changed in a manner unfavourable to it.

Folly ends where genuine hope begins.

The sweetest cordial we receive at last, Is conscience of our virtuous actions past.