What we hold in our heads - our memory, our feelings, our thoughts, our sense of our own history - is the sum of our humanity.

I can't think of anyone I admire who isn't fuelled by self-doubt. It's an essential ingredient. It's the grit in the oyster.

I am interested in the gap between what people say and what they think - the undiscovered world of people's lives. Lives of quiet desperation.

I think the collision between the First and Third world is going to become more and more conspicuous. It's the big cliff that we've all got to climb.

I've always argued, unsuccessfully, that there's no point in giving money to the arts unless you educate people in them.

Resolution, like responsibility, is a product of ownership, and kids can't resolve a conflict until they figure out how they contributed to it.

I envy the happiness of others... I envy the sense of belonging... I seem always to be remaking myself.

If the arts are held up solely as a means of social insight, fantasy is denied the chance to be commonplace and reality the chance to be exotic.

You can't be minimalist as a director until you have acquired the experience and confidence to say no.

Naming a baby is an act of poetry, for many people the only creative moment of their lives.

So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about as numb as a slave in a totalitarian state.

Forget about the consequences of failure. Failure is only a temporary change in direction to set you straight for your next success.

That on a romantic level, if you feel it about somebody and it's pure, it means that they do too.

We should chiefly depend not upon that department of the soul which is most superficial and fallible (our reason), but upon that department that is deep and sure, which is instinct.

most hated by the dark, for their name is light.

I'm very happy to be back playing rugby for England again - there were times when I questioned if this would happen.

There are questions of real power and then there are questions of phony authority. You have to break through the phony authority to begin to fight the real questions of power.

Say what you will about him Ed Koch is still the best show in town.

Started using Google+ while I was living in space.