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.'