“Whether or not you welcome it, moving house requires you to make choic...” — Julia Gillard Quote

Whether or not you welcome it, moving house requires you to make choices about the past as you move into the future. What of all of your bits of stuff is truly valued? What should be left behind?

Middle-income countries need to attend to the education of their poorest people to build their economies and ensure long-term stability.

I have travelled enough internationally to know and accept the reality that, overwhelmingly, people are well disposed to Australia but in truth know very little about it. In particular, people know hardly anything about Australian politics.

Here in Australia we do get impacted by global economic events. But we should have some confidence that our economy has got strong underlying fundamentals.

Often, particularly towards the end of the process, I think of myself less as a theatre director and more as someone who just directs the traffic. My job is to move the ideas and bits of the show into the places where they work best. Sometimes my job is also to say, 'No.'

No artist is well served in thinking what will happen to their works. The best one can hope is that they'll enter the mainstream, and people will pull bits and pieces from them.

Honestly, not being evasive, but the great thing about Bond is that I have fifty years of movies - 23 movies and all the Ian Fleming novels and short stories, all of which are fodder. And when I'm working on the new Bond, I'm constantly going back to Fleming and the other movies - what are the bits and pieces, what are the resonances?

The thing is, the way we write is all jams and bits and pieces that get pieced together and sometimes things are written with intentions of being a song, and then all of a sudden the main riff of this song, six months later turns into a verse or a chorus of another song.