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.

I like L.A., but I think whats changed is that the kinds of films I do, the mid-range dramatic film, has become an endangered species.

A great number of the disappointments and mishaps of the troubled world are the direct result of literature and the allied arts. It is our belief that no human being who devotes his life and energy to the manufacture of fantasies can be anything but fundamentally inadequate.

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

It's possible to disagree with someone about the ethics of non-violence without wanting to kick his face in.

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

I became a virtuoso of deceit. It wasn't pleasure I was after, it was knowledge. I consulted the strictest moralists to learn how to appear, philosophers to find out what to think and novelists to see what I could get away with.