The youth of an art is, like the youth of anything else, its most interesting period. When it has come to the knowledge of good and evil it is stronger, but we care less about it.

Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.

All philosophies, if you ride them home, are nonsense, but some are greater nonsense than others.

In old times people used to try and square the circle; now they try and devise schemes for satisfying the Irish nation.

The reason that war is such a fascinating subject for writers is because it's a revealer. Put a bunch of people in an adrenaline-fuelled, life-or-death situation and their fundamental behaviours are exposed, the scrim is taken away and the motivations behind each personality come out to play.

I was so exhausted after fighting for the project for five years, shooting it was like the Bataan Death March.

We've enshrined the purity, sanctity, value, and importance of bringing children into the world, yet we don't discuss death. There used to be an enshrined period where mourning was a necessary part of going through the process of grieving; death wasn't considered morbid or antisocial. But that's totally gone.

I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.