I saw a photograph of a wedding conducted by Reverend Moon of the Unification Church. I wanted to understand this event and the only way to understand it was to write about it.

I wanted to define the vocabulary of a wedding both visually and intellectually. The book is about more than weddings or wedding dresses. It's a metaphor for women's lives their creativity.

My father always wanted to be the corpse at every funeral the bride at every wedding and the baby at every christening.

I don't feel the need to direct. I tried to get other people to direct Dances but they wouldn't do it. They all thought it was too long. One director wanted to cut the Civil War sequence. Another thought the white woman was very cliched.

My father belongs to the generation that fought the war in the 1940s. When I was a kid my father told me stories - not so many but it meant a lot to me. I wanted to know what happened then to my father's generation. It's a kind of inheritance the memory of it.

Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers.

I wanted to write about my mother as she should have been if she had not been messed up by World War I.

I did a production of 'Journey's End ' an RC Sherriff play about World War I at the Edinburgh Festival. I was 18 and it was the first time that people I knew and loved and respected came up to me after the show and said 'You know you could really do this if you wanted to.'

Everybody now admits that apartheid was wrong and all I did was tell the people who wanted to know where I come from how we lived in South Africa. I just told the world the truth. And if my truth then becomes political I can't do anything about that.

I was not out to paint beautiful pictures even painting good pictures was not important to me. I wanted only to help the truth burst forth.