I've long since stopped worrying about how I'm portrayed in the press because ultimately it's not that important. Everyone who knows me knows I do what I do with the greatest integrity.

When I was young I used to sit in the cinema thinking wouldn't it be great if you could have a film in which the characters were like real people instead of being like actors.

I try and create for the audience something that relates to real-life experience.

Given the choice of Hollywood or poking steel pins in my eyes, I'd prefer steel pins.

I hope I make films where you walk away . . . with work to do, arguments to have, things to worry about, things to care about. In that sense, I would regard what I do as political.

My work is about life as you and I experience it. You're either lucky or you're not lucky; either your relationship works or it doesn't.

But films should be voyeuristic. What else is a film if you’re not snooping into somebody else’s lives?

There's a constant drip and trickle of life that goes into one's awareness really and consciousness of things.

I discover what my film is by embarking on the journey of making it.

The way an actor is trained doesn't ultimately have much bearing on my work. I'm interested in the actor as artist.

It's an unhealthy habit to say that life is what you make of it, and if you want to be happy, then you can be happy. That's just rubbish, basically.

Greatness demands that I understand that I am not nearly as big as I thought myself to be, but that I am capable of becoming far bigger than I ever imagined myself to be.

Ignorant voters of the democracies are always a great threat to the progression of humanity, simply because they give their votes to the people who look like themselves!

4.39 HUMANITY & DIVINITYWhen you lose reasoning you forget humanity, When you forget laughter you lose Divinity.[222] – 4

Undoubtedly, at the moment, the major cause of CO2 emission is what happens in developed countries.

They didn't have a problem with me being wild and crazy when it came time to fill the arenas.

Life is everywhere. The earth is throbbing with it - it's like music. The plants, the creatures, the ones we see, the ones we don't see, it's like one, big, pulsating symphony.

Marriage is the only war in which you sleep with the enemy.

I hope somebody does this to all my crap demos when I'm dead, making them into hit songs.

It's such a luxury to be able to be happy about going to work in the morning.

I met rich men and they became my boyfriends. When I was a kept woman'it was a relationship.