“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.

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 …

Give a civil servant a good case and he’ll wreck it with clichés, bad punctuation, double negatives, and convoluted apology.

Wisdom is not developable, as if it’s a matter of luck or personality or genetics. Well it’s just not the case.