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" Directors sometimes have good ideas that I wished I'd had, not on rewriting but simply on staging. "

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" The way 'star' used to be reserved for a small number of people, and when the star category became so vast, they came up with 'superstar,' and then they came up with 'megastar.' "

" It's so great in the theater when everyone catches up on the truth. "

" If I had been asked to write 1,200 words for a newspaper tomorrow, on any subject, I would just do it rather than leave a white hole in the page. And I think it's a very healthy attitude to take to writing anything. "

" Theatre is a series of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster. "

" I take every possible side. "

" I'm not a theoretician about playwriting, but I have a strong sense that plays have to be pitched - the scene, the line, the word - at the exact point where the audience has just the right amount of information. It's like Occam's razor. "

" If you let the plot be determined by what you feel is in the character's mind at that point, it may not turn out to be a very good play, but at least it will be a play where people are behaving in a kind of truthful way. "

" I just happen to know quite a lot of what happened in Czechoslovakia between 1968 and the fall of Communism. "

" The media. It sounds like a convention of spiritualists. "

" When I was younger, I could do something useful just by being free for half a day, but now I need five days to get the world I've left out of my head and ten days or a fortnight not talking to anyone to hold what I need to hold inside my head. "

" I feel that when I began writing, I had a need to know more about the play before I got into it. I think that's the way I was thinking. But my actual experience is that the best way to find out what the structure is, is by writing the play out laterally. You just have got to be brave enough to start without knowing where you are going. "

" I don't find it easy to think of good stuff to write about. "

" I was so thrilled being a reporter, because it gave you the kind of access to people that you wouldn't ever get to meet. "

" I'm not one of those writers who insist they don't read reviews and don't care much about them. I do read them, and I do care about them, and they're not always what you want them to be in an ideal world. "

" Very often in Chekhov, where he exhibits a little bit of human behavior that you recognize as true, you give a little laugh. It's like a reflex. "

" Personally, I read reviews because I'm interested by them, but they don't have utility for me. "

" It is better of course to know useless things than to know nothing. "

" I'm not interested in clothes; I just like them. "

" As a child, I was airlifted out of the path of the Nazis. Unfortunately, I was parachuted into the path of the Japanese, but then I was airlifted again to India. "

" I am good at being shown something and counterpunching. "

" As a playwright, you can cover a lot of waterfront without being able to hold your own against an expert in any of those areas. I have no illusions about that. "

" One doesn't want one's democracy to behave like a dictatorial or fascistic police. One doesn't. "

" I think I give the impression of being a romantic, and I think inside I'm quite severe. But some might say they had the opposite impression of me. "

" I proudly tell people, 'I have no computer,' so as not to be ashamed of having no computer. "

" For me, the reputation for teaching language in general, and East European languages most particularly, gave Glasgow University, and by reflection the country, a distinction. "

" You do know what's coming up when you're translating. I suppose the concentration, then, is on finding a formulation which is speakable and in character - and economical as well, actually. "

" With plays that require any kind of reading program, I'm reading for a couple of years before using the material. "

" In Chekhov, everything blends into its opposite, just fractionally, and this is sort of unsettling. And that's why you end up 100 years later asking, 'Is that moment tragic or comic?' "

" I'm a very boring person. "

" If I am on a journey where I only have time to read one-and-a-half books, I never know which one-and-a-half I'll feel like reading. So I bring eight. "