Rebecca Miller quotes:

I was an anorexic, beer drinking, class cutting, doodling, shoplifting, skater chick that was into nature, art class, and the beach.

That's one thing I find about having children - it does unlock a door that separates you from other women who've had children.

The quality of life decreases with heightened security.

Every milieu has something ridiculous about it - film-making, the music world, painting - because people who take themselves seriously become funny pretty quickly.

Courtship is romantic. Marriage is an act of will, said Pippa, taking a sip of water. I mean, I adore Herb. But the marriage functions because we will it to. If you leave love to hold everything together, you can forget it.

I don't like getting patted down and taking off my shoes at the airport.

I was trained to look at colour, edges, to see negative space. I honestly think my greatest influence as a writer is from Cubism - the idea of a multi-faceted, multi-perspective way of looking at things.

I would have started writing a lot earlier if I hadn't been [Arthur Miller's daughter].

It is really hard when the actor you pictured can't do the film.

Nobody is so weird others can't identify with them.

Ambition can be a disease, and it feeds on itself.

As much as there are intellectual choices to be made and all the rest of it, a great actor has the ability really, to disappear and lose themself in a kind of mystical fashion. My appreciation and fascination with true acting is really all over the book, definitely.

Deirdre Maddon has an extraordinary, almost celestial way of telling a story. There are so many great writers now - although I also want to go back and read all of Dickens again.

I never had any desire to become a well-known actress.

I was 100 percent sure when I left university that I was going to be a painter.

As if there's a world that exists that you're semi-privy to yet can't quite penetrate - that's how it feels when you're starting a book.

At best, I think of a director as a magnet. You get all the metal fillings in all the individual actors and crew, and get those filings moving toward your magnetic direction.

Every work coming from the creator is about getting the demons out, and each character in those stories had a different personal crisis to get through.

I am half-Jewish, and yet really hadn't been brought up within the Jewish faith. So I had felt culturally Jewish, if that's possible, without really understanding it.

I do think it is a kind of illness in the sense that it sets you apart, it injects you with an endless, unslakable thirst to keep making the thing. The artist has to voluntarily use themselves endlessly.

I had a lot of great lakes of ignorance that I was up against, I would write what I knew in almost like islands that were rising up out of the oceans. Then I would take time off and read, sometimes for months, then I would write more of what I knew, and saw what I could see, as much as the story as I could see. And then at a certain point I had to write out what I thought was the plot because it was so hard to keep it all together in my head. And then I started to write in a more linear way.

I have a great drive to make things and sometimes I forget to slow down a little.

I saw Dolce Vita and my mind was blown by it, by the synthesis. I realised I wanted to be a filmmaker and started making films. I was writing screenplays and couldn't get money because my work was so uncommercial.

I think it's very important to keep being frightened - if you're not frightening yourself, you should take a break. You need to keep experimenting. You also need to take time - that's how you do good stuff - layering and depth of knowledge.

I think one of the great joys of being a writer is you can transcend everything, even your own sex, what century you live in, and how you think. I found it quite natural to think as a male because I actually think that as a female, one often thinks in the mind of a male in terms of eroticism. You think about what the other person feels. So it's not that hard to imagine being that person.

I was always very curious about other people. I would always stare and my mother would say - just please close your mouth!

I was interested in the mystical element of humor - was humor part of creation? Is God laughing at us, or with us?

I'm fascinated by what makes up a self, how one becomes a self, how much is it an answer to others and how much is it an essence of self.

In a way, a lot of my work is in the re-writing once it is cast, as I adapt to the rhythms of how the roles are played out by the actors.

In a way, after you're done directing there is a sense of amnesia that washes over you, you can't exactly remember how you did things. It's a zone, just like an athlete, when they can't remember what they did, but somehow got it done.

I've always been fascinated by the way that children and animals suffer stoically in a way that I don't think adults do.

Looking at paintings was a huge part of finding my way into the lush world of the 18th century.

Novels have become equally important to me as films. I consider myself a storyteller and passionately engaged in both of those disciplines.

One of the things that's good for me is that I can go from one art form to another.

The script is the musical score, and everyone has to play off that score. Even I have to interpret it. The producers are there to eliminate obstacles to that interpretation.

There is a magic thing called 'tone' in a film, that the director must master and maintain.

We all have to embrace the idea not to be worried about there being other women in the room. Gay men work with such solidarity.

Writing is a particular kind of frustration, which is why when I was making the structure for the novel I visualized it for myself with a color-coded board so I could see it.

Writing is acting in the sense that you're imagining and inhabiting another. In the book I was trying to get at the root of what true acting is.

Writing is still a bit of a miracle - the whole process: I see the world, filter the world, write down abstract squiggles on a page which somebody is then able to connect with. I'm still amazed by it and think I always will be.

You work with each individual actor as you perceive their needs to be. It's something that you've figured out in the weeks of pre-production.