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" 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. "

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" In the theater there is often a tension, almost a contradiction, between the way real people would think and behave, and a kind of imposed dramaticness. "

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

" 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. "

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

" All of my scripts are based on other people's novels. Generally, I consider myself as one who writes for theatre. I do not see film work as a continuation of writing for theatre. It is more of an interruption of the writing process. "

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

" It is better of course to know useless things than to know nothing. "

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

" I don't respond well to the Olympic noise, which is the noise of nationalistic triumphalism. "

" Corporeal death is not the whole story. "

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

Responsibilities

" Chekhov directors and Chekhov actors love working on his plays because there seems to be no end to what you can find out about the micro-narrative when you're investigating a text. "

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

" I wish I could remember how to write a play. I can't remember how they happened. "

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

" I think of myself as a theater animal instead of an intellectual animal. "

" I write out of my intellectual experience. "

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

" As a playwright, you can cover a lot of waterfront without being able to hold your own against an expert in any of those areas. I have no illusions about that. "

" 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. "

" One of the attractions of translating 'Heroes' is that it's not the kind of play that I write. If it had been, I probably wouldn't have wanted to translate it. There are no one-liners. It's much more a truthful comedy than a play of dazzling wit. "

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

" I'm a very boring person. "

" I want to support the whole idea of the humanities and teaching the humanities as being something that - even if it can't be quantitatively measured as other subjects - it's as fundamental to all education. "

" I write plays because writing dialogue is the only respectable way of contradicting yourself. I put a position, rebut it, refute the rebuttal, and rebut the refutation. "

" Other people's lives come at us without a backstory most of the time. The present is like that. "

" 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. "

" Rewriting isn't just about dialogue; it's the order of the scenes, how you finish a scene, how you get into a scene. "

" I like pop music. I consider rock 'n' roll to be a branch of pop music. "