We make choices but are constantly foiled by happenstance.

I've always been fascinated by the operation of memory - the way in which it is not linear but fragmented, and its ambivalence.

I'm not a historian but I can get interested - obsessively interested - with any aspect of the past, whether it's palaeontology or archaeology or the very recent past.

It seems to me that anyone whose library consists of a Kindle lying on a table is some sort of bloodless nerd.

The present hardly exists, after all-it becomes the past even as it happens. A tricky medium, time - and central to the concerns of fiction.

We all act as hinges-fortuitous links between other people.

The consideration of change over the century is about loss, though I think that social change is gain rather than loss.

We all need a past - that's where our sense of identity comes from.

Getting to know someone else involves curiosity about where they have come from, who they are.

The Photograph is concerned with the power that the past has to interfere with the present: the time bomb in the cupboard.

Unless I am a part of everything I am nothing.

The sun heals me every day and opens my heart to ever-expanding bliss.

When you cannot use your sword you may take to the weapon of all-prayer. Your powder may be damp, your bow-string may be relaxed, but the weapon of all-prayer need never be out of order.

Misfortune does not help us to believe.

I'm gonna film my entire life and watch it later!

Making pictures, for an actress, is like betting, for a gambler. Each time you make a picture you try to analyze why you won or lost.

Man is free whenever he produces or manifests God, and through this he becomes immortal.

Everything sacred is a tie, a fetter.

The fact that we've been a great democracy doesn't mean we will automatically keep being one if we keep waving the flag.

People aren't going to throw the kind of money at certain people that they used to.

Scientology is weird because it's new.