“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.”

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.

It’s OK to have beliefs, just don’t believe in them.

Jake Green isn’t just Jake Green. Jake represents all of us. The colour green is the central column of the spectrum and the name Jake has all sorts of numerical values. All things come back to him within the film’s world of cons and games.

I think everything you do, characters I always find, have their own voices and once you establish who that character is you find a different voice. I think it’s just a question of establishing that character and the voice speaks through that character.

The best thing to do is find one person in your life and try to love them unconditionally. If you’ve accomplished that, you’ve accomplished a lot.

If you find a TV series that you like, you like the tone of the TV series or the movie.

As I get more and more involved in the child’s world with Rocco his son I’m getting interested in making a film for children.

Sugar is responsible for a lot of deaths. Arguably more than crack cocaine.

I think there’s a natural system in your own head about how much violence the scene warrants. It’s not an intellectual process, it’s an instinctive process.

Other than the fact that I like a country house, I can’t think of anything I’d want to spend my money on.

If somebody has a better idea than me, I’ll take it if it surpasses what we have on the page because at the end of the day, it’s me that takes the credit anyway!

I got into film-making because I was interested in making entertaining movies, which I felt there was a lack of.

I don’t know enough about Woody Allen to be a fan of him.

I still love her. But she’s retarded, too.

The idea is that that there is no such thing as an external enemy.

In that case Mr. Barrow, Mr. Gehrig is a very underpaid ballplayer.

It has perhaps always been the case that the waging of peace is the hardest form of leadership of all.

Think of how many are arrested for selling fake stock, for seducing 14-year-old girls in orphanages under their care, for arson, for murder.

I pray before I go into the operating room for every case, and I ask him to give me wisdom, to help me to know what to do – and not only for operating, but for everything.

Everything is always decided for reasons other than the real merits of the case.

If man asks for many laws it is only because he is sure that his neighbor needs them; privately he is an unphilosophical anarchist, and thinks laws in his own case superfluous.

The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility.

And if this were so in all cases, the principle would be established, that sometimes conditions can be treated by things opposite to those from which they arose, and sometimes by things like to those from which they arose.