An inability to handle language is not the same thing as stupidity.
If you kill a character people feel sad. That's too easy.
I'm trying to write something in which you know that it's all about sex but you never see any.
Obviously VIA DOLOROSA is completely artificial. It is as highly wrought as any of my plays. But basically all the artifice is to disguise itself so you don't feel it's there. You're attempting to make the artifice like a pane of glass that simply leads you through to the subject - not to decorate the bloody glass.
I have a very, very good relationship with 10 percent of the audience. The only purpose of art is intimacy. That's the only point.
Trying to be a socialist and a libertarian is obviously a very difficult balancing act, which nobody has pulled off too successfully in this century.
If you do the things that Britain needs to do - namely, withdraw from NATO, get rid of the bomb, and stop being aligned with one side of the Cold War - then presumably the run on the pound, the result in the stock exchanges of the world, will be fairly catastrophic for the economy. But some sort of political realignment is plainly what this country needs.
I fell into writing plays by accident. But the reason I write plays is that it's the only thing I'm any good at.
I don't see the theater as an establishment. The National Theatre has always seemed to me a people's theater. It was never meant to reinforce the values of the government of the day, nor does it, nor should it.
It's inevitable that you will die, so the only question is when. The great thrillers are the moments that play and tease with the question, "When will it be?"
The ultimate tendency of civilization is towards barbarism.
In those days, the early 1980s, TV and film were interchangeable.
As you write plays, you discover what you believe. And until you know what you believe, you can't write a play.
The one thing that Via Dolorosa has is no opinions. To me, curiosity is 50 times as valuable as opinion.
[VIA DOLOROSA]'s pushing Broadway as far as it can be pushed. I stand before you as a reporter, and you have to decide whether I'm an honest reporter or not. And if you're convinced that I am honest, then I think that you will listen to me in a way that you wouldn't have listened to a fiction where scenes are made. . . . I've thought quite long and hard about what I want to say in this play. And if it means that every single sentiment that I produce is put minutely under an ideological microscope, that's fine.
To those whose God is honor; only disgrace is a sin.
I'm vey bad at marshaling arguments. I can't, at a dinner party, explain why I'm a socialist and why others should be socialists as well.
I think the novel is the American form because people read it in private, and the only valuable things that happen in America happen in private life, because public life is a dead loss.
Insofar as I'm good at directing, it's because I've become a writer.
[David] Mamet's the writer I admire most but he's way off from when he tries to talk about what the moral appeal of liberal thought is. His heart is not in it.
The orthodoxy of America is as rigid as that of Soviet Russia. There is one point of view allowed. If you start a conversation from another point of view, the words dry in your mouth.
I'm not good at standing on platforms and persuading people to my political point of view. Nor would I seek to. My gift is completely different. It's for presenting an imaginative version of the world which I hope people would recognize and be affected by.
Purity is the feminine, truth the masculine of honor.
I never used to kill characters, because I thought killing characters was cheating.
. . . it is true that language and forward movement in the cinema are jolly hard to reconcile. It's a very, very, difficult thing to do. . . . There is still a place in the cinema for movies that are driven by the human face, and not by explosions and cars and guns and action sequences . . . there's such a thing as action and speed within thought rather than within a ceaseless milkshake of images.
