The problem with growing up in a cafe was the cafe never closed, my parents worked every day of the year from morning to night. So it was a big menag….

I don't hold with the notion that only bad books make good movies..

Betrayals during war are childlike compared with our betrayals during peace..

I want to tell stories which require something of an audience, by way of thought, argument, emotion, because I'm more often in an audience than I am ….

Look at it this way: if you write the novel of 'Cold Mountain,' it costs exactly the same to produce and market as a novel set in a room. If you make….

The imaginative leap for me of writing for women is no more difficult than the one of writing for men. I've always wanted to have women well represen….

I was one of five very clever kids, the other kids were cleverer than I was and still are and are very achieving. The girls were always first at ever….

There's this sense of being strange, which is at the heart of every creative person. Every writer, every actor, every director knows who Ripley is. W….

Of course, like all film-makers I've been mesmerised by cinema since I was a child..

I am a teller of stories. A weaver of dreams. I can dance, sing, and in the right weather I can stand on my head. I know 7 words of Latin, I have a l….

The only lesson to extract from any civil war is that it's pointless and futile and ugly, and that there is nothing glamorous or heroic about it. The….

I looked around and we were about a mile-and-a-half from land, and I thought, 'OK, I'm going to drown now.' And then I started to flail out and panic….

As a teenager I was obsessed with music and with writing and performing songs..

When I became the chair of the British Film Institute, I didn't understand how much of my time would be taken up with trying to make a case for the B….

The feeling of not belonging, of not being entirely worthy, of being sometimes hostage to your own sensibilities. Those things speak to me very perso….

I had never thought of myself as a director and found out that I was not. I am a writer who was able to direct the films that I write..

Being a writer-director can sometimes make you incredibly blinkered..

Once you start to realize that a film is the sum of its editing, then editing is the thing you're always looking at..

The best thing about writing has been the writer's life, the sense of being expressed, the ownership of the day, the entirely specious sense of freed….

No studio in Hollywood wanted 'Cold Mountain.' None. No one wanted 'Ripley,' no one wanted 'The English Patient.' That tells you there isn't really a….

I'm interested in stories which insist on a dog fails-to-eat-dog kind of world. I hate misanthropy, want to believe that there's a possibility that w….