The first big break was winning a scholarship to go to Cambridge University. I was very lucky, because my parents couldn't have afforded a university education for me. Without a scholarship I couldn't possibly have gone.

If you're a director, your entire livelihood and your entire creativity is based on your self-confidence. Sometimes that's dangerously close to arrogance.

If you feel very deeply about something, it's not possible to sacrifice your integrity about that.

I've experienced a private doubt, something that I've kept deeply inside, and then eventually delivered a piece of work that people responded to with huge enthusiasm.

Soundbite and slogan, strapline and headline, at every turn we meet hyperbole. The soaring inflation of the English language is more urgently in need of control than the economic variety.

In my early years, my father was away as a soldier in the war. When he came back, work was very difficult to come by. Even though he was a highly skilled man, a maker of furniture, the payment for that work was very poor.

A lot of performing instincts are involved in the business of direction, but so is analysis and having a sense of literature.