If you take a really good book, then the potential is for a really good film. But you've got to get it right.

I'm ashamed to say the first play I saw at the Royal Court was mine.

Often I think the novels I read won't make very good movies - I better not say which I'm looking at for potential films! - but it's nice to have an excuse to just sit and read for a whole day.

I love films. If I'd known how to get into or do it from the word go, I would have done that.

Since my adaptation of Ian McEwan's 'Atonement,' I get sent a lot of novels that people think will work as movies. So every now and then I make a point of sitting down and reading a couple of them.

You see, I always divide people into two groups. Those who live by what they know to be a lie, and those who live by what they believe, falsely, to be the truth.

I have always thought of sophistication as rather a feeble substitute for decadence.