Ken Loach

“There's a heresy which is perpetuated by film school that to be a great director you have to write your own stuff.”

“You'll get unsociable people whatever the nationality, colour, race or creed. I guess the British abroad have probably got the worst record of anyone.”

“You always feel a degree of insecurity about getting through a film.”

“I think that's one of the things that sport teaches you. You are only as good as the team around you.”

“It seems to me the big weakness in most films is the writing. You can learn directing, but you can't learn writing.”

“A journalist uses the most precise words he or she can. An artist does the same sort of thing. You gather material about a particular subject, you refine it as best you can.”

“I don't think films about working class people are sad at all; I think they're funny and lively and invigorating and warm and generous and full of good things.”

“If you're a politician, you can see there might be times when, to secure the greater good, you have to take a backwards step. That is a matter of tactics.”

“It's what people have always done. They have always told stories, put on plays. It's characters and narrative and thought and context and resolution so you reflect the way the world is in some way. It comes out of experience. I think it's OK to do that.”

“Jeremy Corbyn's election was the most hopeful thing since the Labour Party began. He's the first Labour leader who's ever stood on the picket line along with workers.”

“Film is one small voice in a great cacophony of noise from newspapers, from the television, from social media, so it can have a little dent, you know? It can help to create a climate of opinion.”

“People talk about Thatcherism all the time. I felt it was important to record the memories of those almost written out of history who upheld the spirit of '45.”

“I was stage-struck from an early age. I just loved the language. We lived quite near Stratford so I would cycle and watch the plays.”

“Jimmy's Hall' is set in Ireland in the '30s and everything that went under the camera we had to generate.”

“A film has got to demand to be made. Otherwise - if it's just, 'Shall we? Why not?' - you shouldn't make it.”

“I think it's time British filmmakers stopped allowing themselves to be colonized so ruthlessly by U.S. ideas and stopped looking so slavishly to the U.S. market. It demeans filmmaking when they do that.”

“It's time to put back on the agenda the importance of public ownership and public good, the value of working together collaboratively, not in competition.”

“My mum was a peacemaker, and in personal things I tend to do that, because I can't deal with personal conflict. I find that horrible.”

“What the Labour movement is about is a broad mass of people actively engaged in a democratic process.”

“I think cinema is taken a bit more seriously in France.”