The only lesson to extract from any civil war is that it's pointless and futile and ugly, and that there is nothing glamorous or heroic about it. There are heroes, but the causes are never heroic.

The only lesson to extract from any civil war is that it's pointless and futile and ugly, and that there is nothing glamorous or heroic about it. There are heroes, but the causes are never heroic.

You know you lose a lot of social skills if you're a writer. You spend too long alone. And its forced me to address that.

When I became the chair of the British Film Institute, I didn't understand how much of my time would be taken up with trying to make a case for the British Film Institute: what it's for, why it exists, why it needs its money.

I have always believed that there is a need for life-affirming films.

The feeling of not belonging, of not being entirely worthy, of being sometimes hostage to your own sensibilities. Those things speak to me very personally.

As a teenager I was obsessed with music and with writing and performing songs.

Being a writer-director can sometimes make you incredibly blinkered.

I always listen to music, my passion and vice is music, I will be denied access to heaven because of the number of CDs I own, and I have gluttony for all types and colours of music.

I don't hold with the notion that only bad books make good movies.

I had never thought of myself as a director and found out that I was not. I am a writer who was able to direct the films that I write.

I never feel more myself than when I'm writing; I never enjoy any day more than a good writing day.

I was one of five very clever kids, the other kids were cleverer than I was and still are and are very achieving. The girls were always first at everything and I was always 101st!

I work fitfully, in hope rather than in expectation, invent methods which last a week, and fill notebooks with tiny, illegible writing which often defies my own attempts to decipher it.

Look at it this way: if you write the novel of 'Cold Mountain,' it costs exactly the same to produce and market as a novel set in a room. If you make the film, the disparity of costs is huge.

My grandmother was a huge influence on me and the fact that there was this very strong, rather formidable presence of women in my life has been an enormous value.

No studio in Hollywood wanted 'Cold Mountain.' None. No one wanted 'Ripley,' no one wanted 'The English Patient.' That tells you there isn't really an appetite for ambitious movie-making out there.

Of course, like all film-makers I've been mesmerised by cinema since I was a child.

The imaginative leap for me of writing for women is no more difficult than the one of writing for men. I've always wanted to have women well represented in the work that I've done because I've always been around them and around the way they look at the world.

The problem with growing up in a cafe was the cafe never closed, my parents worked every day of the year from morning to night. So it was a big menagerie of kids, business and cooking!

The association promotes a way of life, not causes; a harmony in living, not political faiths; a bilateral loyalty, not commercial or social projects. Yet it is an association for as noble a purpose as any involved in any prior decisions.

Happy the man who has been able to learn the causes of things.

There is one thing higher than Royalty: and that is religion, which causes us to leave the world, and seek God.

The methods of peace propaganda which aim at establishing peace doctrine by argument and by creating a feeling favorable to peace in general seem to fall short of reaching the springs of human action and of dealing with the causes of the conduct which they seek to modify.

Having played an angel for so long, you can imagine that I've been asked to endorse any number of causes over the years. Obviously I have to limit my participation with any charity, so I decided to really concentrate on my love of children.

The final causes, then, of compassion are to prevent and to relieve misery.

I wish I had the billions of dollars that George Soros has that he has used to fund Democratic causes in the past.

It ain't ignorance that causes all the trouble in this world. It's the things people know that ain't so.

The knowledge of anything, since all things have causes, is not acquired or complete unless it is known by its causes.

You may count on Mexico's support, since your commitment to the noblest causes of mankind and your vast experience are and will be invaluable in enabling us, together, to achieve a better world.

In the order of literature, as in others, there is no act that is not the coronation of an infinite series of causes and the source of an infinite series of effects.

It was hard to figure out what were the good causes, the bad causes, even the good politics and the bad politics. So we started taking requests and figuring it out.

Waste no time with revolutions that do not remove the causes of your complaints but simply change the faces of those in charge.

To deal with the true causes of war one must begin by recognizing as of prime relevancy to the solution of the problem the familiar fact that civilization is a partial, incomplete, and, to a great extent, superficial modification of barbarism.

Evil events from evil causes spring.

Therefore in medicine we ought to know the causes of sickness and health.

Beauty is a precious trace that eternity causes to appear to us and that it takes away from us. A manifestation of eternity, and a sign of death as well.

The same characters that keep reappearing, bigger than life, find their own integrity in doing what they do the way they do it, even if it causes their own deaths.

Happiness is a real, objective phenomenon, scientifically verifiable. That means people and whole societies can now be measured over time and compared accurately with one another. Causes and cures for unhappiness can be quantified.

The United Nations charter gives every nation the right to self defence, therefore when the American embassies were bombed it was a matter of time before the Americans responded by going for what they suspected were the causes of the attack.

Sex: the thing that takes up the least amount of time and causes the most amount of trouble.

Let us not suffer from a national amnesia that causes us to forget who and what we are.

The only lesson to extract from any civil war is that it's pointless and futile and ugly, and that there is nothing glamorous or heroic about it. There are heroes, but the causes are never heroic.

It is almost always the cover-up rather than the event that causes trouble.

The thing worse than rebellion is the thing that causes rebellion.

The working classes were becoming more and more sharply aware of the complex causes of international malaise.

The safest and most suitable form of penance seems to be that which causes pain in the flesh but does not penetrate to the bones, that is, which causes suffering but not sickness.

A knowledge of the forces that rule society, of the causes that have produced its upheavals, and of society's resources for promoting healthy progress has become of vital concern to our civilization.

The death tax causes one-third of all family-owned small businesses to liquidate after the death of the owner. It is also an unfair tax because the assets have already been taxed once at their income level.