Quotes from Anthony Minghella

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Adaptation for film is, by definition, a process of editorializing.

The screenplay, obliged to work in its own right, is both an argument with the source material and a commentary on it.

She imagined Ripley sitting at the typewriter with her as she wrote her novel. I imagined her sitting with me as I wrote my screenplay.

This is the real Ripley, the lover of beauty, inspired by art, by antiquity. He's awed. He's cold. He so much wishes he weren't alone.

Because I didn't have a decent jacket. Because I thought it was better to be a fake somebody than a real nobody.

You speak so many bloody languages, and you never want to talk.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.