“I’d probably want to teach at university, because children would drive me insane. I suspect it would be English literature, Shakespeare and so forth. I’ve always been deeply, deeply in love with that kind of thing.”

You don’t sit down and write a wish list about the person you are going to fall violently in love with. It just doesn’t work like that.

Oh, it takes a lot for me to walk out of a film.

I don’t watch TV. I think it destroys the art of talking about oneself.

Many people would no more think of entering journalism than the sewage business – which at least does us all some good.

I get an urge, like a pregnant elephant, to go away and give birth to a book.

I’m a bit of a coward, and lazy, oddly enough.

My father was all brain and little heart.

You can act in five, six, or seven films in the time it takes to direct one film.

I am a lover of truth, a worshipper of freedom, a celebrant at the altar of language and purity and tolerance.

Personally, I’d never seen a graphic novel. I knew they existed because friends of mine like Jonathan Ross collect them and some very literate and intelligent people really rate the graphic novel as a form.

Old Professors never die, they just lose their faculties.

That one can love another of the same gender, that is what the homophobe really cannot stand.

There’s no doubt that I do have extremes of mood that are greater than just about anybody else I know.

To be human and to be adult means constantly to be in the grip of opposing emotions, to have daily to reconcile apparently conflicting tensions. I want this, but need that. I cherish this, but I adore its opposite too.

Because, let’s face it, I do not get offered the parts that Brad Pitt has just turned down.

I feel I would love to close down for a number of years in some way and just be in the country making pork pies and chutneys and never have to poke my head out of the parapet.

Where she offers the kind of insights into the spiritual aspects of Michael Jackson’s creative artistry that mainstream media mostly ignores.

One very important aspect of motivation is the willingness to stop and to look at things that no one else has bothered to look at. This simple process of focusing on things that are normally taken for granted is a powerful source of creativity.

In every aspect of life, purity and holiness, cleanliness and refinement, exalt the human condition.Even in the physical realm, cleanliness will conduce to spirituality.

Pleasure and pain are only aspects of the mind. Our essential nature is happiness.

Strength is but one aspect of power.

I’m not sure that my films show the reality of life in Iran; we show different aspects of life. Iran is a very extensive and expansive place, and sometimes, even for us who live there, some of the realities are very hard to comprehend.

It’s really a sad story, and I liked that. The songs on this album talk about relationships in every aspect.

I’m playing the game because I love it. But I’m also playing it for my family. You play for the glory, but you play for your family, too.