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 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.

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 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.

Thus far we have been able to protect [our children] from the deep and enduring traumas that scar the minds and selves of so many of the patients I see. How — how?—can I make it always so?

We all have that one friend who is either on a road-trip or planning a road-trip or thinking about a road-trip or talking to people who are on road-trip or posting quotes about road-trip.

One day… You are going to remember me and how much I loved you, and then you are going to hate yourself for letting me go.

Fantastic! Right in the middle of that long stretch between Christmas and Spring Break, your coats are getting dirty, everything's dark, dingy - what a great time for a movie!

Only in Britain could it be thought a defect to be too clever by half. The probability is that too many people are too stupid by three-quarters.

Hatred ever kills, love never dies. Such is the vast difference between the two... The duty of a human being is to diminish hatred and to promote love.

You're not like the others. I've seen a few; I know. When I talk, you look at me. When I said something about the moon, you looked at the moon.

Good work ain't cheap, cheap work ain't good.

Honesty in politics is the result of strength; hypocrisy is the result of weakness.

It would be so easy to let my fate just carry me away... following this same path my whole life through. But I know I can't. What I do, I do...with no regrets.