Quotes from Sam Taylor-Johnson

I'm good at keeping secrets.

You think, 'You hired me because I'm a creative artist with a vision. Don't try and knock it out of me.'

Never trust a hippie. That's definitely my motto.

If you love someone, you love someone. It doesn't matter; age, colour, c'mon!

I think that, to be an artist, you have to have a big enough ego to believe that people out in the world want to see what you think is a good idea. And if you don't have that sense of ego, then the minute that idea goes into the world, self-doubt kicks in.

When I decide I want something, I go in like an Exocet missile.

I took on cancer like I take on everything - like a mission and a job to accomplish.

Just because you've faced your own mortality, it doesn't make it any less frightening.

I'm annoying to be around because I keep twitching.

People tell you you're having chemotherapy, but there are different types of chemotherapy, and you don't know which one you're going to get and how it's going to affect you. The people in the hospitals don't always have time to help you understand it.

I'm interested in taking raw human emotions and then isolating them without any narrative structure. In order to achieve this, I try to break out of the narrative conventions that you'd see in a typical feature film.

Anonymity would be a fantastic umbrella. I don't like intrusion.

My mum has always been quite free-spirited, and she has taught me a lot. I think that is probably why I have the sort of mind that I do.

My mum told me once I was a Hindu.

I struggle if I have chaos around me, but at the same time, if I don't have it, I'm uncomfortable. It's a strange thing: If I don't have chaos, I create it.

The line between private and public lives is a fertile one for me. I've lived quite a public life, and it's the reason I have used well-known people in my work. I'm interested in what's going on beneath the facades they present to the world, taking them to a place which is uncomfortable.

When I was out in Georgia doing photographs, I found myself trying to undo my own sense of composition. I'd think, 'Why do I want to take it like this? Is it because I want to take a beautiful picture?' It's quite hard to try and undo it.

Shooting at Coco Chanel's apartment was an unexpectedly absorbing experience. The essence of Chanel is firmly rooted there in all of her possessions, and I truly believe that her spirit and soul still inhabit the second floor.

Directing 'Fifty Shades of Grey' has been an intense and incredible journey for which I am hugely grateful. I have Universal to thank for that.

Despite great advances in women's rights, statistics show that when it comes to the balance of power between the sexes, equality is far from being a global reality.

When you're no longer ill, and everyone's gotten over the fact that you've had cancer, that core of steel doesn't go away, and then I had to find other channels for it.

I was living with my stepfather for a while, and then I moved out and went and lived on my own in Hastings-by-the-Sea from about 16.

I always say, and I truly believe this, that my work is three steps ahead of me. I have an idea for something and I tend to feel like it's leading me and I'll follow the process through, and it's not until after I've seen it that I truly understand why I'm doing this.

I went out of my way to try not to be an artist, because I thought I would end up leading a miserable, obscure life. I tried to escape it for as long as I could, until I had to admit at 25 that that was my path.