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" The idea that being human and having rights are equivalent - that rights are inherent - is unintelligible in a Darwinian world. "

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" Love is - OK, it's 20 things, but it isn't 19. And I think that love reaches for something which is very, very deep in us and is very easily obscured, and is also very easily denied, which is the instinct towards the other person, other than toward the self. "

" Responsibilities gravitate to the person who can shoulder them. "

Responsibilities

" I think of myself as a theater animal instead of an intellectual animal. "

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

" I like plays where people talk a lot. Conversation is sustained. Argument is sustained. "

" After all these years, I definitely associate having a pen in my hand with having an ashtray just out of eye line. "

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

" The idea that public safety, the safety of the innocent, is an absolute which trumps every other consideration, is tacitly abandoned in the way we live. "

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

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

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

" All of my scripts are based on other people's novels. Generally, I consider myself as one who writes for theatre. I do not see film work as a continuation of writing for theatre. It is more of an interruption of the writing process. "

" Chekhov understood that people are mysterious and can't be reduced to what we nowadays call 'motivation.' "

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

" 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. "

" When I think of how things could have turned out, I feel as if I've dodged, not just bullets, but 6mm shells. "

" 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. "

" In the period before the arrival of Mrs. Thatcher, politics had been in such low esteem. Everything was so hedged, so mealy-mouthed. Then along came this woman who seemed to have no manners at all and said exactly what she thought. Everyone's eyes were popping and their jaws were dropping, and I really enjoyed that. "

" 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. "

" I can't remember what my first script was. "

" 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. "

" I have a spasm of envy for the person that was killed by a falling bookcase, as long as it doesn't happen prematurely. "

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

" I write out of my intellectual experience. "

" 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. "

" Time is short, life is short, there's a lot to know. So I skip the entertainers in the newspaper now. I just haven't got time. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Writing a new play shouldn't be seen as a mystery belonging to a priesthood, but as a challenge, a technical challenge, just to get into it. "

" To wrap up the idea of 'Parade's End' in a sentence or two, I would say it's a love story in which we see a man with two women, and we know what's attractive about them. And we know why and what they feel about him. "