I never feel more myself than when I'm writing; I never enjoy any day more than a good writing day.

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 film, the disparity of costs is huge.

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 a maker of films, and that’s the kind of movie I want to see.

There’s a great tradition at the BFI of giving fellowships and I thought one of the great jobs that I’d have at the BFI would be to give them out on a regular basis.

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 British Film Institute: what it’s for, why it exists, why it needs its money.

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

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 represented in the work that I’ve done because I’ve always been around them and around the way they look at the world.

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

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 freedom we have, however slave we are to some boss or other. I wouldn’t trade it for any other life.

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