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" People think I'm very nice, you know. And I'm not as nice as they think. "

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" The fact is, I loved being English. I was very happy to be turned into an English schoolboy. "

" I think theater ought to be theatrical. "

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

" To be 64 is appalling, so what does it matter being 65? "

" 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. "

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

" It's so great in the theater when everyone catches up on the truth. "

" I write plays because writing dialogue is the only respectable way of contradicting yourself. I put a position, rebut it, refute the rebuttal, and rebut the refutation. "

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

" What Tolstoy is on about is that carnal love is not a good idea. "

" I'm a playwright who gets involved in movies when I'm not writing a play. "

" 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. "

" Possibly because I did start off as a journalist, my starting point has always been that you've got to keep an audience with you. Whatever you're doing, you always want a script to be a page-turner. It's very important never, ever, to feel above that. "

" 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. "

" You can't but know that if you can capture the emotions of the audience as well as their minds, the play will work better, because it's a narrative art form. "

" I'm a very boring person. "

" I still believe that if your aim is to change the world, journalism is a more immediate short-term weapon. "

Change The World

" You don't often get a proposal to do Tolstoy for a really interesting director - that's easy to say yes to. "

" Back in the East you can't do much without the right papers, but with the right papers you can do anything The believe in papers. Papers are power. "

" When you write, it's making a certain kind of music in your head. There's a rhythm to it, a pulse, and on the whole, I'm writing to that drum rather than the psychological process. "

" Lou Reed was a hero because he was an anti-hero. "

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

" When Auden said his poetry didn't save one Jew from the gas chamber, he'd said it all. "

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

" I don't think Stoppardian has a precise definition. "

" I write scenes - often quite long scenes - mainly because I still get seduced into writing six lines where one and a half will do. "

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

" 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. "

" Even when the writing seems very frivolous, I'm puritanical. I don't mean my subject matter. It's that I'm almost pathologically incapable of leaving something when I'm not quite happy with it. "

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