“I try to always go for something very interior, following thoughts and memories, something that I think is difficult to do on the screen, which is essentially a third-person medium.”

I started as a songwriter and wanted to be like Leonard Cohen. I’ve always seen my stories as enlarged songs.

And if these incidents now seem full of significance and all of a piece, it’s probably because I’m looking at them in the light of what came later.

I have the feeling of this completely alternative person I should have become. There was another life that I might have had, but I’m having this one.

We all live inside bodies that will deteriorate. But when you look at human beings, they’re capable of very decent things: love, loyalty. When time is running out, they don’t care about possessions or status. They want to put things right if they’ve done wrong.

It is one of the enjoyments of retirement that you are able to drift through the day at your own pace, easy in the knowledge that you have put hard work and achievement behind you.

I was a little concerned that a lot of people thought I wrote Merchant Ivory movies. I also thought if I was ever going to write something strange and difficult, that was the time.

The evening’s the best part of the day. You’ve done your day’s work. Now you can put your feet up and enjoy it.

One is not struck by the truth until prompted quite accidentally by some external event.

As with a wound on one’s own body, it is possible to develop an intimacy with the most disturbing of things.

What interests me is the surprising enormous extent to which most people accept the fate that’s been given to them, and find some dignity.

If you are under the impression you have already perfected yourself, you will never rise to the heights you are no doubt capable of.

I can’t even say I made my own mistakes. Really – one has to ask oneself – what dignity is there in that?

Now naturally, like many of us, I have a reluctance to change too much of the old ways.

Even the solitude, I’ve actually grown to quite like. I do like the feeling of getting into my little car, knowing for the next couple of hours I’ll have only the roads, the big gray sky and my daydreams for company.

There’s still a part of me that thinks I have to write a really good novel. I’m not trying to say I’m not happy with the novels I’ve written in the past. But it always feels to me like there’s another one that I have to write that will really say what I want to say, and really paint this world that I can see hazily in my head.

The problem, as I see it, is that you’ve been told and not told. You’ve been told, but none of you really understand, and I dare say, some people are quite happy to leave it that way.

Now it is established in the sciences that no knowledge is acquired save through the study of its causes and beginnings, if it has had causes and beginnings; nor completed except by knowledge of its accidents and accompanying essentials.

For movies like The Longest Ride, I got to hang out with cowboys at rodeos and learned how to ride a bull, essentially.

The essential humanity of men can be protected and preserved only where government must answer, not just to the wealthy, not just to those of a particular religion, or a particular race, but to all its people.

For mass struggles, nonviolence is essential.

The thing a drama school can’t give you is instinct. It can sharpen instinct but that can’t be taught, and you have to have intuition. It’s an essential ingredient.

Government is essentially immoral.

If it be true, as I believe it is, that morality is dependent upon religion, then religion is not only the most practical thing in the world, but the first essential.

Religion is essentially the art and the theory of the remaking of man. Man is not a finished creation.