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.

It's not easy to strap yourself down to a desk and bash on a keyboard when you know you can direct lots of films, because directing films is fun and interactive and gregarious. Writing isn't.

We're not unique. We're quite volatile as individuals, but that doesn't work exponentially when we are together. Relationships are about eating humble pie.

My principal job is to make interesting and entertaining films, and I'm not proud of which format or which particular technique I use. I just wanted the film to look good.

I'm not under too much of an illusion of how smart or un-smart I am because filmmaking ultimately is about teamwork.

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!

If you change the rules on what controls you... you will change the rules on what you can control.

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

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.

We can all be conned but at what point do we realize that we're being conned and to what point do we allow ourselves to be conned?

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.

The greatest temptations are not those that solicit our consent to obvious sin, but those that offer us great evils masking as the greatest goods.

Fear follows crime and is its punishment.

When you have made it in life, you must give back to those who made you.

[Rock and the intellectual Left] must both be interpreted as parts of the cultural fabric of late capitalism. Their success comes from the bourgeois' need to feel that he is not bourgeois.

Nilekani's technocratic obsession with gathering data is consistent with that of Bill Gates, as though lack of information is what is causing world hunger.

Hurry is the weakness of fools.

Contentment is knowing you're right. Happiness is knowing someone else is wrong.

All that mattered was that something had struck the match, and Gansey was burning.

Direct thy attention to what is said. Let thy understanding enter into the things that are doing and the things which do them.

To write history is as important as to make history. It is an unchanging truth that if the writer does not remain true to the maker, then it takes on a quality that will confuse humanity.