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" My whole life is waiting for the questions to which I have prepared answers. "

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" I'm hopeless at looking into myself and trying to see how things are working and why. "

" I once did a radio program with a famous materialist, that is to say a scientist who believed that absolutely everything was physical and that all emotions were reductive to little electrical impulses in your neurons. And I found that I didn't believe that. But what the emotions really are, I don't have an alternative theory. "

" 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. "

" Chekhov was capable of casually tossing off deplorable comments in his letters, combined with a very modern anger against anti-Semitism. "

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

" My life is sectioned off into hot flushes, pursuits of this or that. "

" I don't feel that I belong anywhere. Or rather, if there's a place I belong, I don't feel I'm there. "

" Honesty is seldom ingratiating and often discomfiting. "

" 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. "

" I don't feel like a Londoner. "

" A healthy attitude is contagious but don't wait to catch it from others. Be a carrier. "

" A writer doesn't really have much of a function on a movie set. "

" You end up going to school plays quite a bit as a parent, there are a lot of kids who are doing the job as well as they can, but there's always one or two who seem much more at home in the world of impersonation. "

" 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. "

" Everybody I know is writing plays twice a year. It's sort of making me feel I am not up to much. "

" I'm good at being funny. "

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

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

" 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. "

" The idea of the state is, or should be, a very limited, prescribed idea. The state looks after the defense of the realm, and other matters - raising revenue to pay for things which are for all of us, and so on. That idea has turned turtle now. The state isn't any longer perceived as an institution which exists to serve us. "

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

" Get me inside any boardroom and I'll get any decision I want. "

" 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. "

" Like most writers, I just create because I have a story to tell, really. "

" I was so thrilled being a reporter, because it gave you the kind of access to people that you wouldn't ever get to meet. "

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

" If I had been asked to write 1,200 words for a newspaper tomorrow, on any subject, I would just do it rather than leave a white hole in the page. And I think it's a very healthy attitude to take to writing anything. "

" You do know what's coming up when you're translating. I suppose the concentration, then, is on finding a formulation which is speakable and in character - and economical as well, actually. "

" If you are well known at something else, you get points for doing stuff which lots of other people do, and much more, and they don't get any points at all. You get over-praised, over-credited. "

" Success is a sort of metaphysical experience. I live exactly as I did before - only on a slightly bigger scale. Naturally, I won't be corrupted. I'll sit there in my Rolls, uncorrupted, and tell my chauffeur, uncorruptedly, where to go. "