For most directors, the scriptwriter is about as welcome on set as a member of the Taliban.

If there's one thing I don't look for in a maid, it's discretion. Except with my own secrets, of course.

If we don't respect the past, we'll find it harder to build a future.

We live a life that is often spent in crowds - parties, festivals and first nights - so it's nice to avoid them.

Sometimes the weekend gets hijacked by work, but as my mother would say, this is the right problem.

People tend to view history as if it were another planet and think the modern world was invented in 1963. I don't agree.

Lust, that state commonly known as 'being in love,' is a kind of madness. It is a distortion of reality so remarkable that it should, by rights, enable most of us to understand the other forms of lunacy with the sympathy of fellow-sufferers. But, paradoxically, mad and suffering as one is, and the heat of the flame, few of us are glad as we feel that passion slip away No, while most people have been at their unhappiest when in love, it is nevertheless the state the human being yearns for above all.