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" 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. "

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" Schepisi is the sort of director who could, would, and frequently did phone me whenever he came across a textual problem. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I like the notion of theater as recreational. "

" I get the impression sometimes that a play arrives in a sequence of events that I have no control over. "

" When I was in my teens, I was very, very keen on being the author of a book. What the book was was secondary. I wanted it to be in hardback. I didn't care how thick or thin it was, and I didn't actually care what it was about. "

" My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful; but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful. "

" 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 don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you're dead. "

" If you let the plot be determined by what you feel is in the character's mind at that point, it may not turn out to be a very good play, but at least it will be a play where people are behaving in a kind of truthful way. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

Responsibilities

" Corporeal death is not the whole story. "

" I write for film or, in this case, television when I haven't got a play cooking. "

" Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled; not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaning it. "

" For a long time I managed to think two things simultaneously, that I am actually a good playwright, and that the next time I write a play I will be revealed as someone who is no good at all. "

" 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. "

" The idea of the state is, or should be, a very limited, prescribed idea. The state looks after the defense of the realm, and other matters - raising revenue to pay for things which are for all of us, and so on. That idea has turned turtle now. The state isn't any longer perceived as an institution which exists to serve us. "

" We're actors. We're the opposite of people. "

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

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

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

" Eternity's a terrible thought. I mean, where's it all going to end? "

" Maturity is a high price to pay for growing up. "

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

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

" In my mind, I always knew what my father looked like. "