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" If Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of 22, it would have changed the history of music and of aviation. "

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" 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. "

" 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. "

" It was a different planet in 1967, the Broadway theatre. It had a little ashtray clamped to the back of every seat and the author got 10% of the gross. "

" It's so great in the theater when everyone catches up on the truth. "

" My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful; but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful. "

" My family was in Singapore when the Japanese War started. We were in Singapore at the time of Pearl Harbor, and by the beginning of 1942, the Japanese invasion of Burma and Singapore had started. "

" Theater in New York is nearer to the street. In London, you have to go deep into the building, usually, to reach the place where theater happens. On Broadway, only the fire doors separate you from the sidewalk, and you're lucky if the sound of a police car doesn't rip the envelope twice a night. "

" The days of the digital watch are numbered. "

" In Chekhov, everything blends into its opposite, just fractionally, and this is sort of unsettling. And that's why you end up 100 years later asking, 'Is that moment tragic or comic?' "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" You are the plays you write. How on earth could you write them otherwise? They're projections of your own predilections. "

" The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means. "

" What is the society we wish to protect? Is it the society of complete surveillance for the commonwealth? Is this the wealth we seek to have in common - optimal security at the cost of maximal surveillance? "

" A movie camera is like having someone you have a crush on watching you from afar - you pretend it's not there. "

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

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

" Theatre is a series of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster. "

" The media. It sounds like a convention of spiritualists. "

" 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'm not like some other writers: I have no actual urgent need or desire to add to what's written. You write it; if you're lucky, it's performed, and that's the end of the whole thing. "

" 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. "

" Life is a gamble, at terrible odds - if it was a bet you wouldn't take it. "

" I've got no interest in educating or instructing people. "

" 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. "

" I'm attracted to the past. "

" 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. "

" I'm aware of my old plays and occasionally think about them, but I'm much more anxious about finding the next play. "

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

" If an idea's worth having once, it's worth having twice. "