"Once Around is a beautiful movie. And it was funny, and it was moving, and it was great. The story itself, which is a true story, is such a remarkable — simple, but not simple — story about a woman who falls in love with a guy who is kind of socially unacceptable. He’s loud, and her family just thinks he’s chalk on a blackboard. It’s how they come to love him. Holly Hunter is fantastic. It’s actually quite a brilliant movie, and I’ve always been extremely proud of it."

"A life’s work may occupy shelf upon shelf, or all the genius may be distilled down to a concentrate of wisdom, and I would love to think that I’ve ever thought anything as clearly as Bishop has thought each of her poems. My favorite lines forever: It is like what we imagine knowledge to be: dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free, drawn from the cold hard mouth of the world, derived from the rocky breasts forever, flowing and drawn, and since our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown."

"This was a BBC Omnibus drama about a young composer from Yorkshire, Eric Fenby, in the late 1920s. He reads that the composer Delius, also from Yorkshire, is now blind, partly paralysed and can no longer compose, with work left unfinished. Fenby manages to help him deliver those last works. It’s an elegiac film about the painful process of creating music and the end of a creative life. It’s very emotional, unsettling and moving. Delius is an incredibly tragic figure, both fragile and brutal. Russell was brilliant at creating images to accompany music."