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" I think I'm a difficult conventional writer. "

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" Responsibilities gravitate to the person who can shoulder them. "

Responsibilities

" I'm not that taken with Freudian perspectives. They seem to be overcomplicated. "

" I've voted in every election - not always for the same political party and never with any degree of enthusiasm. "

" Good things, when short, are twice as good. "

" The truth of the matter is that I used to be much more - as it were - shy. Now I don't care! "

" Maturity is a high price to pay for growing up. "

" I flinch when I see my name in the newspapers. "

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

" A writer doesn't really have much of a function on a movie set. "

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

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

" Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled; not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaning it. "

" The whole excitement for writing anything is quite intense. And for a day or two, you think you've done everything extremely well. The problems start on the third day, and continues for the rest of your life. "

" 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. "

" People have quite a simple idea about 'Anna Karenina.' They feel that the novel is entirely about a young married woman who falls in love with a cavalry officer and leaves her husband after much agony, and pays the price for that. "

" In my mind, I always knew what my father looked like. "

" I've seldom minded other people's opinions, but the other side of that coin is that I've seldom been interested by them, um their opinions about me I mean. "

" Chekhov understood that people are mysterious and can't be reduced to what we nowadays call 'motivation.' "

" I think probably I've been influenced by Chekhov and Walt Disney, if you see what I mean. "

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

" From as long as, literally as far back as I can remember I've liked puns, word jokes, I can literally recall looking at a comic at the age of six or seven and I remember what I enjoyed and what it was precisely and how the joke worked. "

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

" I don't believe there is something called 'film' and something called 'theater,' and that words belong in the theater. Some rather bad films have few words in them; some good films have a lot of words in them. "

" Everybody I know is writing plays twice a year. It's sort of making me feel I am not up to much. "

" If you don't know what is being said, the rest of the actor's work is wasted. "

" Although I don't examine myself in this respect, I would say, off the top of my head, that I've come to acknowledge my Czechness more as I get older. "

" Chekhov was capable of casually tossing off deplorable comments in his letters, combined with a very modern anger against anti-Semitism. "

" I was interested by the idea that artists working in a totalitarian dictatorship or tsarist autocracy are secretly and slightly shamefully envied by artists who work in freedom. They have the gratification of intense interest: the authorities want to put them in jail, while there are younger readers for whom what they write is pure oxygen. "