Shakespeare's plays were a great Teutonic Valhalla with brilliant sunshine at times and violent tempests at others. The world to him was a battlefield, but his sense of poetic justice, his sublime faith in life and its infinite resources, guided the battles.

I have friends among the Christians, whom I love, and never for a moment have I thought of attacking their Christianity.

Watch over your child, as it struggles for breath on the outermost verge of life, or see your wife follow the child to that outermost verge, beside herself for anxiety and sleeplessness, - then love will teach you that life comes first.

The writers who reject tendentiousness and purpose in their work are the very ones who display it in every word they write. I could draw countless examples from the history of literature to show that the more a writer clamours for spiritual freedom, the more tendentious his work is liable to be.

Being over seventy is like being engaged in a war. All our friends are going or gone and we survive amongst the dead and the dying as on a battlefield.

I'm thinking about doing a First World War film.

My experience has been that military assessments on 'how goes the war' are consistently more optimistic than those made by the CIA and other agencies.

The facts of life are that a child who has seen war cannot be compared with a child who doesn't know what war is except from television.