Balance is the enemy of art.
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.
You can't be minimalist as a director until you have acquired the experience and confidence to say no.
Everything people say about grandparenthood is true - it is pleasure without responsibility. It is unquestioned love.
Art is about the 'I' in life not the 'we', about private life rather than public. A public life that doesn't acknowledge the private is a life not worth having.
A place makes a deep impression on you when you're young. It lives with you. It's like your childhood. It fertilises the imagination.
I resent all organised religions.
Don't ever be afraid to ask any question.
I was a chronically shy child. That kernel of my younger self is still there, but I've developed mechanisms to deal with it.
There are those who leave without our needing to detain them; we have said all there is to say.
I've always argued, unsuccessfully, that there's no point in giving money to the arts unless you educate people in them.
I envy the happiness of others... I envy the sense of belonging... I seem always to be remaking myself.
I've always believed that you write to discover what you think. On most subjects, if I'm asked what do I think about them, I'd say I don't know, I'll have to write them down.
Maybe we slip so easily into blaming our parents - you're perpetually a child and they're perpetually a parent and you long to balance the equation, but it can only be balanced posthumously.
I'm inclined to think that, because it's such an awful life, that politicians do go into it for the best reasons. I mean, some may love the sound of their own voice. But it's such a wearying life, you've got to be impelled by some desire to leave the world a better place than when you came into it.
'Mary Poppins,' the movie, was an object of mockery if you were a student in the '60s, something to be laughed at.
The arts are weapons of understanding and weapons of happiness.
I believe there is a relationship between having an interest in the arts and the behaviour of society as a whole. Some politicians find it difficult that the arts is a weapon of happiness... Politics is often about deprivation rather than the opening up of ideas and nourishing creative endeavour.
