Your one certainty in life, your power as a human being, is that you have a choice in every situation about what you do next and about how you take what has happened to you.
I was fed up with the situation I found myself in in the 1960s. I didn't like being a barrister's wife and going out to dinner with other professional people and dealing with middle class life. It seemed claustrophobic.
'Bagdad Cafe' was a film that changed many, many people's lives... how they saw themselves and how they looked at their life situation. I thought I made a little movie. All the mail that I get is about how it changed lives, and that's wonderful.
You have to talk about why things happened the way they did. You can't actually explain my political life except by a series of situations rather than by some carefully constructed, rigidly progressed ascendancy.
My mother took me to a lot of operas and when I was eight I got the opportunity to be in one and I realized that transformation into these make-believe situations was possible. I decided that was essentially what I wanted to do with my life.
I feel like, in general in my work life, my main goal has been to just be in a situation where I'm not bored with my job. That's been the entire principle. Got my wish.
I wouldn't, a little bit frightened but throughout my life I'd learnt that when you're in the serious situations, you've got to try to stay calm. Because that's the way you get out of them.
Touring is an incredibly isolated situation. I don't know how people tour for years on end. You find a lot of people who can't stop touring, and it's because they don't know how to come back into life. It's sort of unreal.
The embarrassment of a situation can, once you are over it, be the funniest time in your life. And I suppose a lot of my comedy comes from painful moments or experiences in life, and you just flip them on their head.
You think that religion is a thing that is there to help you and to see you through life, and then you wake up one morning and find the entire Irish situation, the civil war that's based on religion.
Just having the camera, being able to pull back from situations and be an observer, it saved my life... I realised I could find these intimate moments and that people trusted me. That, basically, my camera was magic.
I never could have planned this, and now I'm in my ideal situation career-wise and just sort of where I am in my life, and I'm super happy with how everything's going.
My eyebrows - they have a life of their own. I don't arch them on purpose; I don't do, like, arching exercises or anything, I promise! I try to maintain a neutral mass, but they just sort of go with whatever the situation is!
Look, you're on the set for six months, with someone who's rooting to be attracted to you, and you're rooting to be attracted to them. I never understood the separation of work and life in that situation. But the time I spent with Megan was our own t...
I don't go off and sit down and try to write material, because then it's contrived and forced. I just live my life, and I see things in a word or a situation or a concept, and it will create a joke for me.
Fantasy allows you bend the world and the situation to more clearly focus on the moral aspects of what's happening. In fantasy you can distill life down to the essence of your story.
My life is quite physical anyway. When you are three-foot-six you kind of have to climb stuff now and again, and you find yourself in quite precarious situations just to manage in what is quite a big world.
I love information. I want to stay current. I don't want to be under-informed. But I'm busy. Sometimes, I need an instant overview of a situation that I can grasp in a second.
I liked doing comedies, but as I got older I was better suited to do Westerns. Because I think it becomes unattractive for an older fellow trying to look young, falling in love with attractive girls in those kinds of situations.
A lot of times when you go through a very traumatic situation and it's emotionally difficult to deal with you come back spiritually stronger. It changes you in a way.
We revolutionaries acknowledge the right to revolution when we see that the situation is no longer tolerable, that it has become a frozen. Then we have the right to overthrow it.
