Famous quotes by Neil Jordan:

"If you were having an affair, with, say, your friend's wife, and you had to meet her... cross the street in San Francisco where you knew you wouldn't be observed. And you went to meet her one day, and she walked across the street and got his by a truck. And you say, first of all, 'oh God... I hope she's alive.' Secondly you say, 'I'm never ever going to do this again."

"I began to see the character more as a metaphor for how a person survives and manages to maintain his innocence. I just love the bravery and elegance with which he faces the violence in the world."

"There's no point in making a film out of a great book. The book's already great. What's the point?"

"The most difficult thing is the organization of people and the expression of your intentions. It's very easy to have a picture in your head and to imagine that you've told everybody about what you need."

"Well, I suppose I'm interested in ways of storytelling and in stories that are about storytelling."

"When you've written a movie, you then get together with a whole lot of people and make it. In many ways, I think it is far nicer to be with people rather than being completely solitary."

"And I think I often choose to do something because it's quite different from what I've done before."

"But everyone gets burnt, don't they? Certain things are outside of your control. I suppose the only thing you can learn as a director is to not put yourself into situations where it can get outside of your control. And that's what happened."

"For me now, it's about what you would write and what you wouldn't write, and that's how I select what I am going to do. It can be quite nice being brought a concept by a studio for me to work on."

"For me, the filmmaking has to be about the dramaturgy."

"I can't do a film if I don't start with the writing."

"I do enjoy working with writers."

"I took two years away from making films to write a novel."

"I'm less comfortable making American movies because I don't know them so well."

"I've also worked hard portraying an Ireland which is fast disappearing. Ireland was a very depressed and difficult place in the 1980s, and I've tried to include that in the script. I worked really hard to find the heart of the book."

"In Dreams... well, I was slightly overcompensating with that. I was a bit like a director for hire, so maybe I was putting too much imagery that was familiar to me into it."

"It is extremely difficult to get movies that cost more than $40 million to be made these days."

"It's hard to know whether certain characters come to life or not, they either come to have their own life or they don't. I've written many things in which the characters just remain inert."

"It's the opposite journey from what I've usually done with films. I find it very easy to go from, say, a lit, pleasurable environment, like what you see outside there, to a very dark place. But the opposite journey, which is what this movie takes, is much more complicated."