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

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

" A 'human right' is, by definition, timeless. It cannot adhere to some societies and not others, at some times and not at other times. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Very often in Chekhov, where he exhibits a little bit of human behavior that you recognize as true, you give a little laugh. It's like a reflex. "

" I think age is a very high price to pay for maturity. "

" That I have the right to express myself freely at all times in all circumstances entails the idea that free speech is a 'basic human right' possessed by each individual, and, as such, trumps the interests of the society or group, including my neighbour. "

" 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. "

" The House of Lords, an illusion to which I have never been able to subscribe - responsibility without power, the prerogative of the eunuch throughout the ages. "

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

" 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. "

" When you try to grasp the way the Western world is going, you see that we are on a ratchet towards a surveillance state, which is coming to include the whole population in its surveillance. This is our reward for accepting the restraints on the way we live now. "

" Fatherlessness didn't strike me as being an event. It was a state of life. "

" It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" One doesn't want one's democracy to behave like a dictatorial or fascistic police. One doesn't. "

" It was a different planet in 1967, the Broadway theatre. It had a little ashtray clamped to the back of every seat and the author got 10% of the gross. "

" I am as miserable as anyone - sometimes. "

" To be in love with Debo Devonshire is hardly a distinction. "

" If I wanted to change the world, the last thing I would do is write a play. "

Change The World

" If you associate enough with older people who do enjoy their lives, who are not stored away in any golden ghettos, you will gain a sense of continuity and of the possibility for a full life. "

" I never had any frustration about writing uncredited. I always felt that the satisfaction of doing it was in the doing of it, really, and getting recognised by the small number of people that know what you did. "

" I'm attracted to the past. "

" 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. "

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