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" 'Hamlet' is so modern; 'Coriolanus' is utterly alien to our consciousness, and that makes it difficult for us. "

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" I think, for any writer, when you write, you just write. "

" Sometimes we don't want to be lectured; we prefer to be taken on a journey. "

" The thriller protagonist is really just us in extremis. He or she is this individual who is placed under enormous pressure, has huge moral dilemmas and decisions to make. "

" I can only be instinctive in my reaction to Shakespeare. "

" The 'Ramayana' explores the limits of secular freedom and the limits of religion. "

" 'Hamlet' is a play of many strange parts, with ghosts and players, politicians and clowns. "

" It's a very bleak play, but there is some final sense of redemption. 'Coriolanus' shows mercy, a Christian virtue in an otherwise un-Christian world. "

" We don't live in vacuums; we do care about the world, and we do want to believe our country is doing the right thing on our behalf. "

Doing The Right Thing

" I would say what you have to do as a screenwriter is strip the book back to find the skeleton. When you've found the skeleton - that's what you trust - you reclothe. "

" Directing is extrovert and gregarious; writing is isolating, introverted, and lonely. "

" The reason it's called 'The Heart of Robin Hood' is that he starts off not having a heart - or certainly not being in contact with it. And through a series of stories, he learns to discover that he has one. He becomes much more dramatic as a character, to be honest, because there's something rather too smug about the endless do-gooder. "

" The character of Robin Hood stands for the deep anger of the dispossessed against the ruling classes. "

" I always just read the play and find a world. That world must honour the play, enhance it, and maybe shine some new light - not satirise or try to reinvent in a way that is placing the idea above the thing. The play is the thing. "

" We turned Cambridge theatre upside down, using odd spaces and devising everything collaboratively. It eventually blew apart, but I'm still proud of some of what we achieved. The style was very disciplined, and we had the sense to keep things short. "

" Comedy is good at analysing and dealing with evil because it doesn't present it as evil but a collection of banalities. "

" The 'Mahabharata' is a more complex and longer saga than the 'Ramayana,' which is like a fairy tale. It's much lighter and more fun, and at its heart, there's a cracking love story. "

" Most Robin Hood stories are not very exciting. There are not a lot of surprises. "

" Theatre is a bastard form. I'm always proud of that. That's what makes it taste of life. "

" Perhaps I'm temperamentally driven to see things from the point of view of the attacked rather than the attacker. "

" There's nothing more frightening - and exciting - than getting lost in a forest. There is a journey towards the light, and you've got to go through the dark to get to the light. That's what the forest is all about. "

" When you go into a forest, anything can happen. "

" 'Game of Thrones' is fundamentally based on a Machiavellian, almost Jacobean, idea of power and intrigue. "

" The world in the '90s had seemed somewhat stable. There was talk of the end of history, a calm consensus around where we were all going. Consumer capitalism with some sort of social conscience. Then 9/11 happened, and that illusion was blown out of the water. "

" I think Le Carre is a great modernist writer, which is to say, in a godless world, he invokes deep, almost religious ideas of betrayal, trust, faith, and that's why we love it. "

" We go into nature to transform. "

" You can't cast Hittites as Trojans; I'd love to do it, but sadly, there are none available! "

" I was very struck by the fact that Robin Hood became increasingly taken over by the middle and upper classes. He starts out a bandit but becomes a fully fledged aristocrat. "

" I love telling stories. I don't really think in terms of clear 'aims.' "

" All comedy is funny because it tells us truths that we recognise through laughter, but that doesn't mean it can't be unnerving. Think of 'Fawlty Towers'; it can be very, very dark, but by God, it's funny. The two things are not in opposition. "

" The story of Ilium, the ancient city of Troy, has always gripped me. "