I'm a theatre person, that's who I am. I'm happy to make sojourns into the world of movies but I'm basically a theatre director that potters off and does a couple of movies.

I am, in fact, Superman. Every morning I wake up and go into a telephone booth and change my costume, and then go to work.

You go through a process of refinement and getting rid of the excesses of your early youth in terms of your excitement about what theatre can do.

There are a few writers that one has a relationship with that means, basically, you do whatever they say. One is Caryl Churchill, and the other is David Hare.

I have never been motivated by money in my life. You can't make choices based on what the financial return might be.

England is strictly class-based. What's surprising is how many films are still made with a load of people in silly frocks running around gardens and talking in middle-class accents.

At school, I decided I wanted to be a director and then I went out and spent the rest of my adult life trying to be a director. It was really clear to me. So in that sense I was very lucky.

As soon as I know how to do something, I usually get bored with it.

I always say, 'I really need to take a break.' It's three days in and I'm getting pretty bored.

I categorically resist this idea that films are supposed to be autobiographical and the only stories you tell are about your own life.

I would love to do something for TV... I wanna do 'Kavalier & Clay' on HBO as an eight-parter. It'll be so much better as a series, honestly.

Speed eliminates all doubt. Am I smart enough? Will people like me? Do I really look all right in this plastic jumpsuit?

I don't believe in pessimism.

They made burning statements with questions, and killing tools out of laughs. It was mass cruelty. A mood come alive. Words walking without master...

The money can be a hindrance to someone like me because the danger is that you start thinking, 'Is that a $20 million take?' That kind of thing, and being self-critical.

I know quite certainly that I myself have no special talent; curiosity, obsession and dogged endurance, combined with self-criticism, have brought me to my ideas.

Love is like a shadow, one can only catch it by falling into it.

It so happened that I was on a German sailing vessel on the way to Australia when the ship was captured, and on the high seas I was made prisoner by the French.

With half the race gone, there is half the race still to go.

I've always played the guys that end up having the wisecracks.

Whatever labels are being pinned on me have nothing to do with me.