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

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" I don't believe there is something called 'film' and something called 'theater,' and that words belong in the theater. Some rather bad films have few words in them; some good films have a lot of words in them. "

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

" The notion that the 'leader' has the right to ask huge sacrifices of your generation for a notional future paradise - if you'd be good enough to lie down under the wheels of the juggernaut - that sentimental and self-aggrandising rationalisation for brute force and cowardice I felt from adolescence was wrong. "

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

" People have quite a simple idea about 'Anna Karenina.' They feel that the novel is entirely about a young married woman who falls in love with a cavalry officer and leaves her husband after much agony, and pays the price for that. "

" I take every possible side. "

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

" 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. "

" 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 father was a doctor in Moravia, in the south of the country. There were a number of Jewish doctors in the hospital there, and at a certain point - almost too late, really, but in time - they were all sent overseas by their employer. "

" I don't feel like a Londoner. "

" I just happen to know quite a lot of what happened in Czechoslovakia between 1968 and the fall of Communism. "

" Obviously, you would give your life for your children, or give them the last biscuit on the plate. But to me, the trick in life is to take that sense of generosity between kin, make it apply to the extended family and to your neighbour, your village and beyond. "

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

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

Change The World

" I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you're dead. "

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

" The truth of the matter is that I used to be much more - as it were - shy. Now I don't care! "

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

" Life in a box is better than no life at all... I expect. "

" I don't keep a diary and I throw away nearly all the paper I might have kept. I don't keep an archive. There's something worrying about my make-up that I try to leave no trace of myself apart from my plays. "

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

" When I was younger, I could do something useful just by being free for half a day, but now I need five days to get the world I've left out of my head and ten days or a fortnight not talking to anyone to hold what I need to hold inside my head. "

" Time is short, life is short, there's a lot to know. So I skip the entertainers in the newspaper now. I just haven't got time. "

" All your life, you live so close to truth, it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye. And when something nudges it into outline, it is like being ambushed by a grotesque. "

" I don't believe that we evolved moral psychology; it just doesn't seem plausible to me as a biological phenomenon. "

" Childhood is Last Chance Gulch for happiness. After that, you know too much. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" If you don't know what is being said, the rest of the actor's work is wasted. "