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" My scripts are possibly too talkative. Sometimes I watch a scene I've written, and occasionally I think, 'Oh, for God's sake, shut up.' "

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

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

" I'm not that taken with Freudian perspectives. They seem to be overcomplicated. "

" 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. "

" If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older. "

" One of the reasons why there are so many versions of Chekhov is that translations date in a way that the original doesn't; translations seem to be of their time. "

" When I was 20, the idea of having a play on anywhere was just beyond my dreams. "

" I like trying to create a spark through a collaboration between me and the audience. "

" 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. "

" Hotel rooms inhabit a separate moral universe. "

" I don't even know what my voice is to this day. "

" Quite early on, and certainly since I started writing, I found that philosophical questions occupied me more than any other kind. I hadn't really thought of them as being philosophical questions, but one rapidly comes to an understanding that philosophy's only really about two questions: 'What is true?' and 'What is good?' "

" I think I give the impression of being a romantic, and I think inside I'm quite severe. But some might say they had the opposite impression of me. "

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

" Fatherlessness didn't strike me as being an event. It was a state of life. "

" I never had any frustration about writing uncredited. I always felt that the satisfaction of doing it was in the doing of it, really, and getting recognised by the small number of people that know what you did. "

" My desk faces the water, and I'm perfectly happy sitting there. I'm never lonely. "

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

Responsibilities

" I get the impression sometimes that a play arrives in a sequence of events that I have no control over. "

" Directors sometimes have good ideas that I wished I'd had, not on rewriting but simply on staging. "

" I barely remembered my father; I'm confused between genuine memory and the few photographs that survived. "

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

" When I was 20, in 1957, and maybe you would say I was old enough to know better, but nevertheless, I was completely nuts about Buddy Holly. And I loved pop bands that had absolutely no intellectual pretensions whatsoever. I loved the Monkees. "

" 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 can be affectionate about a lot of things without watching them. "

" The idea that anybody might be allowed to use their common sense when clearly no harm is being done is part of history now. "

" Every exit is an entry somewhere else. "

" Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering. "