I've tried to make 'Strictly Ballroom' impossible to date. It does feel a bit '80s but I consciously made sure there was no technology in the movie that could date it.

When I was writing 'The Abstinence Teacher ' I really tried to immerse myself in contemporary American evangelical culture.

I didn't want to be the archetypal sponging brother-in-law so I didn't go into acting when I got to the States. I thought 'No I'll go to school and then I'll be an English teacher that'll be fun.' But I was horrible as a teacher. As hard as I tried I just couldn't inspire those kids to take an interest in Milton and Shakespeare and Donne.

I want to make sure I don't interfere with the success of that team next year. I don't see any way I could go to practice like most of 'em do and not hurt the team. I'd go nuts if I tried doing that.

There was a perception of me and I earned it because I was really intense really gruff. I treated certain people poorly at times. It was because of who I was. It was almost my strength. I came in all business. I tried to find ways to fit in with that demeanor but it's not easy.

I left because I could no longer make records that sounded less and less like me. I tried to please people instead of believing in my own strength until the only thing I could do was walk away.

Now being a girl I was ashamed of my body and my lack of strength. So I tried to be a man. I shot rode jumped and took part in all the fights of the boys.

I tried to get a baseball movie made a couple of years ago and I don't think it didn't happen because I was a woman but because sports movie don't sell internationally.

We tried to set up a company that patterned ourselves after Southwest in all the fun the spirit the great people the smile the efficiency side of it but we've added some extras that people aren't used to finding on Southwest.

I think I've always had a certain amount of skepticism of this whole 'shut up and smile' theory. I haven't ever swallowed that pill so easily although I tried.

I've tried to be a straight scientist doing the science and reporting it as best I can.

As I have tried to show science in producing the airplane and the wireless has created a new international political environment to which governments must adjust their foreign policies.

We sat around on a hotel balcony with a bottle of wine and tried to figure out how you would go about blowing up a planet. That's the kind of conversations science fiction writers have when they get together. We don't talk about football or anything like that.

Though many have tried no one has ever yet explained away the decisive fact that science which can do so much cannot decide what it ought to do.

Mainly I thought of Barney as a kid. You can always look into the faces of kids and see what they're thinking if they're happy or sad. That's what I tried to do with Barney.

My mother and father were very strange people. They tried to be funny which is always very sad to me.

I want to be remembered as somebody that tried to respect her integrity as an artist and as a person. And I don't want to be in any box. I don't want to be one thing.

We tried to approach this as though there's never been a Superman movie before but at the same time respecting the canon and mythology. There are the pillars that you have to respect and I'm not about to break them. But it is fun for me to bend them and mess with them.

I try to respect the rules of the silent movies and I tried to make signification to make sense and also the crew were very good and the fact that we shot in LA in the real Hollywood studios and houses. We shot in the bed of Mary Pickford and you cannot be any more accurate than that so that helped a lot.

Because we should always respect other nationalities I have always tried to play them with dignity.

If Milosevic is to be tried he has to be tried by a proper court an impartial properly constituted court which has international respect.

But I have tried to go over it very carefully not merely what the evidence is but with psychoanalysts and psychologists and I think we're just about all agreed that Lincoln and Speed did not have a homosexual relationship.

I have tried to preserve in my relationship to the film the same closeness and intimacy that exists between a painter and his canvas.

Over the years I've been trying to build a relationship with an audience. I've tried to maintain as much of a low profile as I could so that those characters would emerge and their relationship with audiences would be protected.