Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" I write scenes - often quite long scenes - mainly because I still get seduced into writing six lines where one and a half will do. "

Related Quotes:

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

" 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. "

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

" In the end, one has to feel lucky that things fell out O.K. I've felt that all the years I've been writing plays. "

" A publisher many years ago asked if I'd like to write a novel for £50. And I said, 'Absolutely.' "

" It is better to be quotable than to be honest. "

" When 'The Dark Side of the Moon' was a new album in 1973, a friend of mine walked into my room where I was working with a copy in his hand and said, 'You really have to do a play about this album.' "

" I'm a very boring person. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" The fact is that people are attracted to new work and by new work. "

" The idea that public safety, the safety of the innocent, is an absolute which trumps every other consideration, is tacitly abandoned in the way we live. "

" 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. "

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

" Like almost everything else from the West, the Romantic Revolution arrived late in Russia. "

" James Joyce - an essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized. "

" 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. "

" I consider myself to be a very fortunate person and to have led a very fortunate life. "

" I like the notion of theater as recreational. "

" I like plays where people talk a lot. Conversation is sustained. Argument is sustained. "

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

" You can't but know that if you can capture the emotions of the audience as well as their minds, the play will work better, because it's a narrative art form. "

" Possibly because I did start off as a journalist, my starting point has always been that you've got to keep an audience with you. Whatever you're doing, you always want a script to be a page-turner. It's very important never, ever, to feel above that. "

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

" Nobody would be killed on the roads if the speed limit were 10 miles an hour. "

" Theater is still a medium which attracts young writers. You'd think that it would be all over by now, with television and film. But it's not. "

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

" One senses that all the Bolsheviks, even those who ended up as cold-blooded autocrats, had been on a journey from idealism to something else, and didn't notice - to mix periods - when the Rubicon was crossed. "