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" I get the impression sometimes that a play arrives in a sequence of events that I have no control over. "

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" I can't remember what my first script was. "

" 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. "

" We're actors. We're the opposite of people. "

" Hotel rooms inhabit a separate moral universe. "

" I was an awful critic. I operated on the assumption that there was an absolute scale of values against which art could be measured. I didn't trust my own subjective responses. "

" Rewriting isn't just about dialogue; it's the order of the scenes, how you finish a scene, how you get into a scene. "

" To be in love with Debo Devonshire is hardly a distinction. "

" I wanted to be in the theater. It is simply the way I felt. "

" 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. "

" I was delighted to not go to university. I couldn't wait to be out of education. "

" I have about a dozen cassettes lying about which I use in random order. Very often, I pick up a cassette to dictate a letter, and I find my voice coming back at me with the lines of plays three years old. "

" If the audience is made to do not enough work, they resent it without knowing it. Too much and they get lost. There's a perfect pace to be found. And a perfect place that is different for every line of the play. "

" I don't know that I want to share all my most intimate secrets. "

" When I was in my teens, I was very, very keen on being the author of a book. What the book was was secondary. I wanted it to be in hardback. I didn't care how thick or thin it was, and I didn't actually care what it was about. "

" I don't feel like a Londoner. "

" When I was a reporter in Bristol, which I was between the years 1954 and 1960, the newspaper would get tickets for whoever showed up to play a gig at the big hall down the road, so I saw some wonderful people. The Everly Brothers, for example. "

" There are certain sorts of jokes which have only to do with the substitution of the unexpected word in a familiar context. If you translated something into French and then had it translated back into English by somebody who didn't know the original, you'd lose what was funny. "

" I write out of my intellectual experience. "

" Chekhov directors and Chekhov actors love working on his plays because there seems to be no end to what you can find out about the micro-narrative when you're investigating a text. "

" I write for film or, in this case, television when I haven't got a play cooking. "

" 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 always loved rock 'n' roll. "

" You don't often get a proposal to do Tolstoy for a really interesting director - that's easy to say yes to. "

" I don't want to come over as some boringly self-deprecating person. But I don't see myself as a groundbreaking writer in the way plays are structured. "

" The whole thing about writing a play is that it's all about controlling the flow of information traveling from the stage to the audience. It's a stream of information, but you've got your hand on the tap, and you control in which order the audience receives it and with what emphasis, and how you hold it all together. "

" When you try to grasp the way the Western world is going, you see that we are on a ratchet towards a surveillance state, which is coming to include the whole population in its surveillance. This is our reward for accepting the restraints on the way we live now. "

" I'm very garrulous, but I don't say anything. "

" I'm very unhappy about my entire life if my writing is going wrong. "

" If I hadn't left Czechoslovakia, I would have been dead. "

" All of my scripts are based on other people's novels. Generally, I consider myself as one who writes for theatre. I do not see film work as a continuation of writing for theatre. It is more of an interruption of the writing process. "