Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" It takes a lot of effort to be vibrant. "

Related Quotes:

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

" 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. "

" Eternity's a terrible thought. I mean, where's it all going to end? "

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

" 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. "

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

" I don't find it easy to think of good stuff to write about. "

" One of the nice things about the world of filmmaking is that you make friends in the business. Sometimes directors feel a script needs something, but they're not sure what it is, so they show it to a friend; if the friend is a writer, he ends up kicking around with that script for a while. "

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

" I am aware, as everybody has to be, that there's more competition for one's attention nowadays. "

" 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. "

" You should not translate for more than two hours at a time. After that, you lose your edge, the language becomes clumsy, rigid. "

" 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. "

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

" I'm a conservative kind of person. I don't think rightwing is quite the same thing. But I acknowledge my conservatism of temperament. "

" 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. "

" If I wanted to change the world, the last thing I would do is write a play. "

Change The World

" I don't do interviews under false pretenses. "

" 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. "

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

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

Falling In Love

" I like the notion of theater as recreational. "

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

" If the audience is made to do not enough work, they resent it without knowing it. Too much and they get lost. There's a perfect pace to be found. And a perfect place that is different for every line of the play. "

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

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

" I proudly tell people, 'I have no computer,' so as not to be ashamed of having no computer. "

" I think probably I've been influenced by Chekhov and Walt Disney, if you see what I mean. "

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

" As a child, I was airlifted out of the path of the Nazis. Unfortunately, I was parachuted into the path of the Japanese, but then I was airlifted again to India. "