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It is never right to play ragtime fast.

There's that thing about the '80s, the '40s and the '60s, and the '30s, the '50s and the '70s. Something about those odd decades in this century that weren't too pleasant.

I chose a time in the century which had the greatest moments for novels - the late '30s and World War II.

Movies were very important. The art-form of the 20th century.

I think future generations will say the late 20th century and the early 21st century was a time of great convulsions and upheavals.

I've always wanted to do a period movie, to do something the turn of the century, and I'm really fascinated by that whole time period.

After World War II society had to settle back for a moment before it picked up the 20th century.

When I did a study of all the coming-of-age movies that meant a lot to me, whether it was 'The Graduate' or 'Rebel Without a Cause' or 'Dead Poet's Society,' they all had that timeless feel. None of them were completely married to the details of their age. They felt timeless in their treatment of it. That's what made them resonate with me.

It's becoming clearer and clearer to me that the world is there to be celebrated by writers, and in fact this is what all the good ones do, and that the great fashion for gloom and grimness was in fact a false path that certain writers took, I think in response to the horrors of the first half of the twentieth century.

But the eighteenth century, on the whole, loathed melancholy.