What follows is more about books than it is about me, but nonetheless it is my inward autobiography, for the words we take into ourselves help to shape us.

Goblins burrowed in the earth, elves sang songs in the trees: Those were the obvious wonders of reading, but behind them lay the fundamental marvel that, in stories, words could command things to be.

You never came out the way you came in.

God doesn't want your careful virtue, He wants your reckless generosity.

The emotions that sustain religious belief are all, in fact, deeply ordinary and deeply recognisable to anybody who has ever made their way across the common ground of human experience as an adult.

Emotions can certainly be misleading: they can fool you into believing stuff that is definitely, demonstrably untrue.

We are supposed to be on the side of goodness in the sense that we need it, not that we are it.

I can always tell when you're reading somewhere in the house,' my mother used to say. 'There's a special silence, a reading silence.

When I'm tired and therefore indecisive, it can take half an hour to choose the book I am going to have with me while I brush my teeth.

Self-awareness is not the same thing as self-approval, any more than imagination is the same thing as day-dreaming.

God use times of adversity to revive the spirit of every man.

China is a much richer country than any part of Europe.

Stephenie Meyer + Science = wrong!

You know, women are burdened with all this other crap all the time, like looking good. You need to be really superhuman to be successful as a woman.

I live more than anything else to produce the Games.

Hey, I saw this old British movie, all the people spoke so different, you could hardly understand them. But everyone here speaks American as good as you and me. What's with that?

They all do the same things. They may think their sins are original, but for the most part they are petty and repetitive.

Salander was afraid of no-one and nothing. She realized that she lacked the necessary imagination - and that was evidence enough that there was something wrong with her brain.

Skin bathed in summer sunset light is sultry and sublime. Every woman looks irresistible in its glow-relaxed and sensual.

It just seems like that because I do a lot of independent films that don't get to the mainstream.