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I'm a little hesitant to make my characters sentimental or to risk having the work labeled sentimental. It's something that I resist as a reader, and I don't resist it in life. I'm not an unmoved person by any stretch, but I think I don't want, I guess, to indulge those kinds of things sometimes in fiction. I can't tell you why exactly.

I think that in some cases, I've made films that have a sentimental quality, at least as part of the film.

In film, it's very important to not allow yourself to get sentimental, which, being British, I try to avoid. People sometimes regard sentimentality as emotion. It is not. Sentimentality is unearned emotion.

According to the perverse aesthetics of artistic guilty pleasure, certain books and movies are so bad - so crudely conceived, despicably motivated and atrociously executed - that they're actually rather good.

Critics have a problem with sentimentality. Readers do not. I write for readers.

There is nothing I hate more than sentimentality.

I'm always frustrated when somebody makes a movie out of a book and they leave the book behind, or the heart of it.

Just as good books give me the joys of being alive, bad novels depress me, and as I notice this sentiment coming from the pages, I stop. I also do not hesitate to walk out of a movie house if the film is bad.

I don't know if I like being the sentimental favorite.

I think I'm a very sentimental person. Conscious or not, that's what draws me to the kind of films I want to make.