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

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" Back in the East you can't do much without the right papers, but with the right papers you can do anything The believe in papers. Papers are power. "

" My father was a doctor in Moravia, in the south of the country. There were a number of Jewish doctors in the hospital there, and at a certain point - almost too late, really, but in time - they were all sent overseas by their employer. "

" I have a spasm of envy for the person that was killed by a falling bookcase, as long as it doesn't happen prematurely. "

" The more doors there are for you to open, the better the play. "

" Corporeal death is not the whole story. "

" I like trying to create a spark through a collaboration between me and the audience. "

" I've never really worked out this thought, and I don't know if I'm really conscious of it, but I can see there's an attraction about writing about a period that's over and isn't going to change colour while you look at it. "

" A healthy attitude is contagious but don't wait to catch it from others. Be a carrier. "

" 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. "

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

" If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older. "

" 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. "

" Any revival in which I am involved is liable to change. "

" The idea that being human and having rights are equivalent - that rights are inherent - is unintelligible in a Darwinian world. "

" I adopted England as least as much as England adopted me. "

" I don't think falling in love in Slovakia is much different from falling in love in Tunbridge Wells. "

Falling In Love

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

" Schepisi is the sort of director who could, would, and frequently did phone me whenever he came across a textual problem. "

" It is no light matter to put in jeopardy a single life when it is the very singularity of each life which underpins the idea of a just society. "

" 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.' "

" When Auden said his poetry didn't save one Jew from the gas chamber, he'd said it all. "

" The fact is, I loved being English. I was very happy to be turned into an English schoolboy. "

" I don't keep a diary and I throw away nearly all the paper I might have kept. I don't keep an archive. There's something worrying about my make-up that I try to leave no trace of myself apart from my plays. "

" My life feels, week to week, incomplete to the level of being pointless if I am not in preparation for the next play or, ideally, into it. "

" I think I enlist comedy to a serious purpose. "

" My intention still is to write a play to commemorate, possibly rather skeptically, the 50th anniversary of the Russian revolution. I started it at the beginning of 1966, but confronted with the enormous importance and reality of that revolution, I absolutely boggle. I don't know what to do about it. "

" 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. "

" The thing that happens remarkably often is that the people who are writing a dissertation believe they need to speak to me in order to do their dissertation. They need to interview me. "

" The House of Lords, an illusion to which I have never been able to subscribe - responsibility without power, the prerogative of the eunuch throughout the ages. "

" I went to an English school and was brought up in English. So I don't feel Czech. "