I stood there in the kitchen, watching her staring across the meadow still searching for her nemesis and I thought, suddenly, that this is all our lives - this is the one fact that applies to us all, that makes us what we are, our common mortality, our common humanity. One day someone is going to come and take us away: you don't need to have been a spy, I thought, to feel like this.

We keep a journal to entrap that collection of selves that forms us, the individual human being.

We talked filth for a pleasant half hour.

Writing a film - more precisely, adapting a book into a film - is basically a relentless series of compromises. The skill, the "art," is to make those compromises both artistically valid and essentially your own. . . . It has been said before but is worth reiterating: writing a novel is like swimming in the sea; writing a film is like swimming in the bath.

We never love anyone. Not really. We only love our idea of another person. It is some conception of our own that we love. We love ourselves, in fact.

I tend to admire dead people more than the living. All too often, human reality diminishes the glowing reputation.

I have teken refuge in the doctrine that advises one not to seek tranquility in certainty but in permanently suspended judgement.