You can go to places in Africa and Asia and find Marley graffiti. In the slums of Nairobi, you see his lyrics painted on walls, and you realise he has this almost religious significance to the underclass of the world. He's a guy born in a hut with no bed, and now he's probably the most listened-to artist in the world. It's fascinating.

You can relate to someone with a flaw.

There were many times during the filming of 'Touching the Void' when I wondered why I had ever thought I wanted to make this film.

When I was growing up on Loch Lomondside, one of the first albums I ever bought was Marley's 'Uprising.' I guess that would have been 1980 - just before he died.

I love submarine movies.

I love Humphrey Jennings. People ask me who my favorite documentary maker is, and he's certainly in the top three.

For everybody in the world, the answers to the mysteries in your life usually lie in your childhood, your upbringing, and your parents.

'Uprising' was one of the first three or four albums I ever bought in 1980 when I was 13, and that had a strong impact on me.

No man, no woman is without their flaws.

The only obligation you have as a film-maker is to tell your version of the truth and to use your film to illuminate reality. Whatever that means.

I've fallen out very badly with some of the subjects I've interviewed, because they see their lives a certain way; to step into a cinema and see your life depicted in another way can come as a terrible shock.

If there's a principle really worth sticking up for, I'll go the whole way.

The tradition has always been that in Roman films, the Romans are always British, and it's usually posh British: Laurence Olivier and his ilk. My take on all this was that it's a metaphor for empire and the end of empire.

It's nice to stretch in different directions and use different muscles. You can get swallowed into Hollywood, where it's all about bums on seats and how commercial a film is.

I'm not particularly ethnically Scottish; I have one grandfather who is Scottish, although he's called Macdonald, and you don't get a lot more Scottish than that. The Scottish part of my family are from Skye, and I've always been very aware of that - always been very attracted to Scottish subject matter, I guess.

When you look at almost every submarine movie, to some degree or another, there's this 'Moby Dick' element, this Ahab element to them.

When you see how people in the developing world react and how they use a camera, you realise how narcissistic we are and how the filming of ourselves and thinking that we're interesting enough to care about is odd.

Community colleges are the way of the future.

Actually, after many years on the campaign trail, there is not a particular food that I've come across that I would avoid.

I mean, I deal with so many problems on a personal basis with my students and I think to myself, 'Nobody ever trained me to do this.'

A lot of students who are 18 or 19 go to college partly for the social aspect of it. At the community college, people's goals are a little different. Their needs are more immediate.

The passage of the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010 was a substantial victory for community colleges.

I try to take good care of myself.

Life is change.