It was a world that I wanted to record because it was such a miracle visitation to me.

What she did was to open our eyes to details of country life such as teaching us names of wild flowers and getting us to draw and paint and learn poetry.

For the first time I was learning how much easier it was to leave than to stay behind and love.

Bees blew like cake-crumbs through the golden air, white butterflies like sugared wafers, and when it wasn't raining a diamond dust took over which veiled and yet magnified all things

But our waking life, and our growing years, were for the most part spent in the kitchen, and until we married, or ran away, it was the common room we shared.

Such a morning it is when love leans through geranium windows and calls with a cockerel's tongue. When red-haired girls scamper like roses over the rain-green grass, and the sun drips honey.

I was set down from the carrier's cart at the age of three; and there with a sense of bewilderment and terror my life in the village began.

All civilizations at some time have fallen into this total terror, when the mystery of life was a kind of panic only to be assuaged by the spilling of blood.

I wanted to communicate what I had seen, so that others could see it.

In London, Man is the most secret animal on earth.

Effie M. was a monster. Six foot high and as strong as a farm horse.No sooner had she decided that she wanted UncleTom than she knocked him off his bicycle and told him.

It's a small thing, a life.

There is no code among men because there are no men anymore. Only monsters who sit behind their desks and give orders.

Sin can be forgiven, but stupid is forever.

When I'm on the road, I'll break my exercise into a cardio session and a weights session.

Working on The West Wing was similar in many ways to my experience on M*A*S*H, because you had people willing to work late at night to get it just right.

There's a great tradition at the BFI of giving fellowships and I thought one of the great jobs that I'd have at the BFI would be to give them out on a regular basis.

The highest form of vanity is love of fame.

Only in the irrational and unknown direction can we come to wisdom again

I was writing novels in high school and apprenticed myself in a way both to Faulkner and to Hemingway.

Without reading, we are all without light in the dark, without fire in the cold.