10 quotes to celebrate Jane Campion's 60th birthday

Jane Campion

Academy Award winning screenwriter, producer and director Jane Campion celebrates her 60th birthday today. She is one of New Zealand's greatest success stories - the second of four women ever nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director, as well as the only female to ever receive the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

Here are ten of our favourite quotes from her.

1. On romance

I think that the romantic impulse is in all of us and that sometimes we live it for a short time, but it's not part of a sensible way of living. It's a heroic path and it generally ends dangerously. I treasure it in the sense that I believe it's a path of great courage. It can also be the path of the foolhardy and the compulsive.

2. On questioning life

I can get very philosophical and ask the questions Keats was asking as a young guy. What are we here for? What's a soul? What's it all about? What is thinking about, imagination?

3. On tragedy

Tragedy makes you grow up.

4. On bringing ideas to reality

There are some things that are real, that you can see, that you can observe, like the moon, and grass and things. But for ideas to become real, they have to be played on your senses. They have to come through you. And that act brings them into the world.

5. On television versus film

Television is the new frontier. Film is conservative. I'm sick of it.

6. On being a teenager

I hated life as a 14-year old. It's intense when you're a teenager: so much feeling and no experience of managing it. "Just grow up" is cruel advice. Getting older is the best cure.

7. On success

Everyone likes you more when you're unsuccessful. Success is better than failure, but it doesn't teach you as much.

8. On sex

You know, sex is actually not so original as the way people love or the stories behind each relationship, which is what you remember. Sex is sex in the end.

9. On violence

Actual violence has no attraction for me at all.

10. On postponing life

Women often postpone their lives, thinking that if they're not with a partner then it doesn't really count. They're still searching for their prince, in a way. And as much as we don't discuss that, because it's too embarrassing and too sad, I think it really does exist.

- nzherald.co.nz