"Drama lives on conflict. If you're trying to deal with social issues seriously, there's no way of avoiding violence, which is so present in society."

"And if there was one title that could be applied to all my films, it would be 'Civil War' - not civil war in the way we know it, but the daily war that goes on between us all."

"To be perfectly honest, I think that as I'm growing older, I'm just growing more impatient. I'll be very happy if at some point people say, 'Michael's grown wiser and softer in his old age.' But we'll have to wait and see what my next project is."

"When I first envisioned 'Funny Games' in the mid-1990s, it was my intention to have an American audience watch the movie. It is a reaction to a certain American cinema, its violence, its naivety, the way American cinema toys with human beings. In many American films, violence is made consumable."

"I was embarrassed that I even wanted to become an actress because coming from L.A., with two older sisters in the business and a mom who had been a ballet dancer, it was such a cliche."

"I've felt that if you dwell too much on your errors, you're dealing in the negativity of things. I don't like that. I'd rather work on the positive reinforcement, the things I did well."

"Whether a woman's running for office or she's supporting her husband who's running for office and she gets criticised for wearing open-toed shoes or for the colour of her coat, there's just a lot of history that you bear if you are a woman who puts herself out in the political arena."

"Politics is the reflex of the business and industrial world."