I started my cooking 'career' aged 15 almost 20 years ago. At the time it was quite a shock suddenly working 75 to 80 hours a week without time to play football or other sports.

Suddenly I've got an overwhelming desire to surround myself with the aura of classical and Romantic art.

But I remember the moment when my father died. I wasn't a very committed Catholic beforehand but when that happened it suddenly all felt so obvious: I now believe religion is our attempt to find an explanation for us to feel more protected.

I was writing short films and I was going through this really really really terrible end of a relationship that I didn't want to be going through. It was too much for me to process and all of a sudden I had this idea for my first feature film and I knew right away I had to start writing it.

How do you build a relationship when you've hardly shared a word but suddenly share a child? How do you love a daughter you don't see for nearly two years? When does she become your daughter? How does she become your daughter?

I wanted very much to do Traffic and at one point it looked like I was going to work on it. And then of course Catherine Zeta-Jones had her relationship with Michael Douglas and it suddenly didn't happen.

The miracles of the church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off but upon our perceptions being made finer so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.

In the world of energy politics the sudden vanishing of the word 'coal' is a remarkable and unprecedented event.

A lot of men in politics suddenly woke up to the issue of women in politics when they realised: hey there are votes in this!

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.

Character... is a habit the daily choice of right over wrong it is a moral quality which grows to maturity in peace and is not suddenly developed on the outbreak of war.

I've worked so hard to eliminate the inner geek from my life. I suddenly realize I have no patience for those people who still have their geeks showing. Now I see why being 'normal' has been so important to me.

I had a couple of movies that I was passionately involved with that I could never get made. 'Richard Pryor ' I wrote for - gosh - over a year. That was close to getting made for two-and-a-half years after that. We're still pushing it you know. It is weird. Suddenly you wake up and it's like 'God five years have gone by.'

I'm a spoilt brat. I thought I was just going to walk in and make movies. But I'd been my own boss for so long that all of a sudden to be facing a roomful of people who were niggling over every little scene... I just thought I'd go back and draw my comics and have a happy life.

I just love movies so suddenly you're political about movies and that's dark. It's just not fun when something you love becomes calculated.

With the CGI suddenly there's a thousand enemies instead of six - the army goes off into the horizon. You don't need that. The audience loses its relationship with the threat on the screen. That's something that's consistently happening and it makes these movies like video games and that's a soulless enterprise. It's all kinetics without emotion.

I've seen many many movies over the years and there are only a few that suddenly inspire you so much that you want to continue to make films.