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

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" 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'm a very boring person. "

" Like many people, I only knew of Ford Madox Ford through a book called 'The Good Soldier,' which is everybody's favorite Ford Madox Ford if they have one, but I came to read 'Parade's End' when it was suggested via Damien Timmer of Mammoth Screen. "

" I like dialogue that is slightly more brittle than life. I have always admired and wished to write one of those 1940s film scripts where every line is written with a sharpness and economy that is frankly artificial. "

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

" 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. "

" If I see an actor in a role that is really terrifying, no matter how many times I meet him socially, I'm still frightened of him. I think he's going to hit me. "

" I am not a mathematician, but I was aware that for centuries, mathematics was considered the queen of the sciences because it claimed certainty. It was grounded on some fundamental certainties - axioms - that led to others. "

" 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. "

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

" Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art. "

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

" 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. "

" It takes a lot of effort to be vibrant. "

" I want to support the whole idea of the humanities and teaching the humanities as being something that - even if it can't be quantitatively measured as other subjects - it's as fundamental to all education. "

" I don't draw on my inner life in my work. "

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

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

" Hotel rooms inhabit a separate moral universe. "

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

" I think I'm a difficult conventional writer. "

" 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.' "

" If enough things that are untrue are said about you, no one will know what really is true. "

" I have two garden parties a year to avoid going out to dinner. "

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

" It is better to be quotable than to be honest. "

" Why should I write a play? I don't have to write a play, do I? But somehow, I think that's what I'm here for, so I'd better do it. "

" It is no light matter to put in jeopardy a single life when it is the very singularity of each life which underpins the idea of a just society. "

" Somebody who likes to do my plays is a good director for them. "

" As a child, I was airlifted out of the path of the Nazis. Unfortunately, I was parachuted into the path of the Japanese, but then I was airlifted again to India. "