I am, in fact, Superman. Every morning I wake up and go into a telephone booth and change my costume, and then go to work.

You go through a process of refinement and getting rid of the excesses of your early youth in terms of your excitement about what theatre can do.

There are a few writers that one has a relationship with that means, basically, you do whatever they say. One is Caryl Churchill, and the other is David Hare.

I'm a theatre person, that's who I am. I'm happy to make sojourns into the world of movies but I'm basically a theatre director that potters off and does a couple of movies.

I have never been motivated by money in my life. You can't make choices based on what the financial return might be.

England is strictly class-based. What's surprising is how many films are still made with a load of people in silly frocks running around gardens and talking in middle-class accents.

At school, I decided I wanted to be a director and then I went out and spent the rest of my adult life trying to be a director. It was really clear to me. So in that sense I was very lucky.

As soon as I know how to do something, I usually get bored with it.

I always say, 'I really need to take a break.' It's three days in and I'm getting pretty bored.

I categorically resist this idea that films are supposed to be autobiographical and the only stories you tell are about your own life.

I would love to do something for TV... I wanna do 'Kavalier & Clay' on HBO as an eight-parter. It'll be so much better as a series, honestly.

We need hope, or else we cannot endure.

No great thing comes without a curse.

Wherever we look, the work of the chemist has raised the level of our civilization and has increased the productive capacity of our nation.

What people tell me they take away from my books is that they can shape their lives, they can achieve their own dreams. And certainly that's what I want them to take away.

My personal philosophy of life is one of ethics

There are certain things that are obviously problems and should be topics of conversation that aren't.

The philosophy of hedonism means little to lovers of pleasure. They have no inclination to read philosophy, or to write it.

Philosophy for me is essentially atheistic. Now that's an anxious atheism. It's an atheism that is anxious because it inhabits questions that were resolved religiously in the pre-modern period.

My dad took me to my first movie.

You never work for somebody else. Someone else might sign your check, but you're the one who fills in the amount.