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" The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means. "

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" 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. "

" I think probably I've been influenced by Chekhov and Walt Disney, if you see what I mean. "

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

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

" I was an awful critic. I operated on the assumption that there was an absolute scale of values against which art could be measured. I didn't trust my own subjective responses. "

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

" I don't want to come over as some boringly self-deprecating person. But I don't see myself as a groundbreaking writer in the way plays are structured. "

" I take every possible side. "

" The whole thing about writing a play is that it's all about controlling the flow of information traveling from the stage to the audience. It's a stream of information, but you've got your hand on the tap, and you control in which order the audience receives it and with what emphasis, and how you hold it all together. "

" I don't act, I don't direct, I don't design. "

" I write out of my intellectual experience. "

" 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. "

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

" You can't go around chasing your own plays and showing up every time somebody does one somewhere. You just cross your fingers and hope that they're OK. "

" One senses that all the Bolsheviks, even those who ended up as cold-blooded autocrats, had been on a journey from idealism to something else, and didn't notice - to mix periods - when the Rubicon was crossed. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" I wish I could remember how to write a play. I can't remember how they happened. "

" 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. "

" I was interested by the idea that artists working in a totalitarian dictatorship or tsarist autocracy are secretly and slightly shamefully envied by artists who work in freedom. They have the gratification of intense interest: the authorities want to put them in jail, while there are younger readers for whom what they write is pure oxygen. "

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

" The possibilities are infinite with new writing; every time you open a new script, there's no limit to what it might contain. "

" The printed word is no longer as in demand as when I was of the age of pupils or even at the age of the teachers teaching them. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

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