Top 34 Quotes & Sayings by Anthony Minghella

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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!

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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!

There's a great tradition at the BFI of giving fellowships and I thought one of the great jobs that I'd have at the BFI would be to give them out on a regular basis.

You know, you lose a lot of social skills if you’re a writer. You spend too long alone. And it’s forced me to address that.

I am a teller of stories. A weaver of dreams. I can dance, sing, and in the right weather I can stand on my head. I know 7 words of Latin, I have a little magic... and a trick or two. I know the proper way to meet a dragon, I can fight dirty but not fair. I once swallowed thirty oysters in a minute. I am not domestic, I am a luxury and, in that sense, necessary.

I looked around and we were about a mile-and-a-half from land, and I thought, 'OK, I'm going to drown now.' And then I started to flail out and panic. I gradually calmed down and I got home. But the reality was that in that moment I was panicking and I feel like that to me was the clue about Ripley, that Ripley constantly finds himself out of his depth in the film and then reacts very, very badly.

[Abbas Kiarostami] is a great artist and a poet. I sometimes think that if Samuel Beckett made films, he'd make them like Kiarostami makes them.

I am a writer who was able to direct the films that I write.

I want to tell stories which require something of an audience, by way of thought, argument, emotion, because I'm more often in an audience than I am a maker of films, and that's the kind of movie I want to see.

The BFI exists to celebrate all poets of world cinema, of the past and present.

Waiting is part of writing. When I write the word 'waiting' by hand it even looks like 'writing.'

I'm interested in stories which insist on a dog fails-to-eat-dog kind of world. I hate misanthropy, want to believe that there's a possibility that we might all be redeemed, that hope deferred makes the soul sick, that our humanity is fragile, funny, common, crazy, full of the longing for love, the failure of love.

Betrayals during war are childlike compared with our betrayals during peace.

There's this sense of being strange, which is at the heart of every creative person. Every writer, every actor, every director knows who Ripley is. We've made careers and lives out of pretending, making things up, inhabiting other people's stories and lives. That's what I do every day. . . . The story is so audacious and subversive: a central character who behaves badly and isn't apparently caught. That intrigued me no end.

The best thing about writing has been the writer's life, the sense of being expressed, the ownership of the day, the entirely specious sense of freedom we have, however slave we are to some boss or other. I wouldn't trade it for any other life.

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

Once you start to realize that a film is the sum of its editing, then editing is the thing you're always looking at.