“I am relatively familiar with getting a good old rumping from the critics. In some cases, the critics just didn’t like the film – fair cop. Others, I think, didn’t understand it.”

We can all be conned but at what point do we realize that we’re being conned and to what point do we allow ourselves to be conned?

If you change the rules on what controls you… you will change the rules on what you can control.

I can understand that the whole world is interested in my wife Madonna. That’s even why I married her.

I think it’s that much harder to make a good comedy than it is straight and apparently serious.

I like to think that we’ve got a plan, so let’s stick to it. That said, once we’ve stuck to it, we’re allowed as much improvisation as anyone cares to indulge themselves in.

I suppose directing on set is the most fun because it’s a good crack and you feel you’re on the battlefield whereas writing is a fairly solitary undertaking.

I don’t like the idea of agents in a typical form. The idea of agents, to me, brings up the idea of a man in a very boring suit who’s not very good looking and doesn’t have much attention to style.

I’m not under too much of an illusion of how smart or un-smart I am because filmmaking ultimately is about teamwork.

It’s not easy to strap yourself down to a desk and bash on a keyboard when you know you can direct lots of films, because directing films is fun and interactive and gregarious. Writing isn’t.

One of the interesting and exciting things about my job is watching technological ground being pioneered.

I got too fed up with films that didn’t make you think. I liked the idea of one that you’d have to be dancing around with. I like my mind to be engaged when I watch a film.

I’d like to work with the missus, but there’s nothing in the pipeline at the moment.

Previously, on Lock, Stock, I went to bed at two in the morning and woke up at five in the morning, and on this one I was known to nod off on the set occasionally.

I like death. I’m a big fan of it.

I’m not politically motivated. I used to be – passionately. I used to be very Left wing. Then I went very Right wing, and now I rest somewhere in the middle.

I like filming in the UK – I’ll sleep in my own bed, which I’m really happy about.

I was a basket case, you know? When I got mad, I threw clubs, you know? And if things weren’t going well.

In the case of the environment, there’s no one to bail it out.

I believe this uranium business will give the Anglo-Saxons such tremendous power that Europe will become a bloc under Anglo-Saxon domination. If that is the case, it will be a very good thing. I wonder whether Stalin will be able to stand up to the others as he has done in the past.

The solution of the difficulty is that the two mental pictures which experiment lead us to form – the one of the particles, the other of the waves – are both incomplete and have only the validity of analogies which are accurate only in limiting cases.

If people know we expect good things from them, they will in most cases go to great lengths to live up to our expectations.

They would rather have an eternity of contentment, even if that eternity were fixed and frozen, like a butterfly mounted in a case.

Dealing with a simple burglary can require 1000 process steps and 70 forms to be completed as a case goes through the Criminal Justice System. That can’t be right.

The Republicans have a back up plan in case you do get sick …