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

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" 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. "

" Even when the writing seems very frivolous, I'm puritanical. I don't mean my subject matter. It's that I'm almost pathologically incapable of leaving something when I'm not quite happy with it. "

" I'm attracted to the past. "

" One feels that the past stays the way you left it, whereas the present is in constant movement; it's unstable all around you. "

" 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? "

" The text loses its virginity simply by being staged: it's no longer the abstract ideal version; it's an event. "

" 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. "

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

" Hotel rooms inhabit a separate moral universe. "

" 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?' "

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

" Age is a very high price to pay for maturity. "

" 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 am not somebody who meets a man or a woman somewhere and feels like that is an incredible character that I must write into a play. "

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

" Because theatre is a story-telling art form, we feel entitled to assume that the playwright got there before we got there. "

" The thing about talking about human rights is that when one bears in mind the sharp end of it, one does not want to worry too much about semantics. "

" There are many, many more small theater spaces than there were when I was starting out. "

" One always likes to think that other countries are not like one's own. "

" 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. "

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

" In the end, my children put me on to Pink Floyd when they were teenagers. "

" Like many people, I only knew of Ford Madox Ford through a book called 'The Good Soldier,' which is everybody's favorite Ford Madox Ford if they have one, but I came to read 'Parade's End' when it was suggested via Damien Timmer of Mammoth Screen. "

" 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. "

" I think that the present is worth attention, one shouldn't sacrifice it to future conceptions of, of this future or that future. "

" I don't think Stoppardian has a precise definition. "

" Every exit is an entry somewhere else. "

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

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

" For me, the reputation for teaching language in general, and East European languages most particularly, gave Glasgow University, and by reflection the country, a distinction. "