And I believe we need heroes, I believe we need certain people who we can measure our own shortcomings by.

I think it is obscene that we should believe that we are entitled to end somebody's life, no matter what that person has supposedly done or not done.

I'm a passionate trade unionist.

At my age the only problem is with remembering names. When I call everyone darling, it has damn all to do with passionately adoring them, but I know I'm safe calling them that. Although, of course, I adore them too.

I am passionately opposed to capital punishment, and I have been all my life.

I believe in trade unionism, and I believe in democracy, in democratic trade unionism.

I can't write, I can't paint, I don't compose.

I do care about style. I do care, but I only care about style that serves the subject.

I don't read a great deal of fiction, to my shame, other than the classics.

I just love biography, and I'm fascinated by people who have shifted our destinies or our points of view.

I prefer fact to fiction.

I think Tom Paine is one of the greatest men that's ever lived.

I was on my own union council for twenty-odd years.

If you've ever seen the film In Which We Serve, but it was about a destroyer in the Mediterranean.

Pier Angeli was in the movie called Sea of Sand that Guy Green directed where this idea came up.

There's nothing more important in making movies than the screenplay.

What I am sad about is that there is now, in America, no equivalent to the art circuit.

And there are certain things, and they are evident, obviously, without being boring about it, but I mean obviously, the two evident and easy ones being Gandhi and Cry Freedom, there are things which I do care about very much and which I would like to stand up and be counted.

David has asked me, a number of people have asked me and said, What performance do you like best or what's the best film you've made and so on and I don't really have any hesitation that the film I'm least embarrassed by and ashamed of or uneasy about is Shadowlands.

I came from a family who believed in, in quotes, the Rights of Man, who believed that in order to justify the sort of luxurious life that the majority of us have, related to the whole world, that you had to do something.