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" One feels that the past stays the way you left it, whereas the present is in constant movement; it's unstable all around you. "

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" When 'The Dark Side of the Moon' was a new album in 1973, a friend of mine walked into my room where I was working with a copy in his hand and said, 'You really have to do a play about this album.' "

" 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. "

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

" If Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of 22, it would have changed the history of music and of aviation. "

" I wanted to be in the theater. It is simply the way I felt. "

" The whole notion of journalism being an institution whose fundamental purpose is to educate and inform and even, one might say, elevate, has altered under commercial pressure, perhaps, into a different kind of purpose, which is to divert and distract and entertain. "

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

" The whole philosophy of modern times is to dissolve distinctions between individuals and deal with them as large collections of people. It's essentially self-interested on the part of authority. "

" I loved the Beatles when they turned up, and the Stones when they turned up, and never really stopped liking them. "

" Embarrassingly enough, I often can't remember how I came to write something. "

" I'm very garrulous, but I don't say anything. "

" 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 think age is a very high price to pay for maturity. "

" 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. "

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

" I feel that when I began writing, I had a need to know more about the play before I got into it. I think that's the way I was thinking. But my actual experience is that the best way to find out what the structure is, is by writing the play out laterally. You just have got to be brave enough to start without knowing where you are going. "

" I always loved rock 'n' roll. "

" I'm vaguely embarrassed by myself sometimes. "

" A free press needs to be a respected press. "

" There are too many things I find it difficult to say 'no' to. "

" I cannot say that I write with any social objective. One writes because one loves writing, really. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" I adopted England as least as much as England adopted me. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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