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.
— Tom Stoppard
Somebody who likes to do my plays is a good director for them.
My family was in Singapore when the Japanese War started. We were in Singapore at the time of Pearl Harbor, and by the beginning of 1942, the Japanese invasion of Burma and Singapore had started.
One doesn't want one's democracy to behave like a dictatorial or fascistic police. One doesn't.
I really just like to be at a desk.
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.
After all these years, I definitely associate having a pen in my hand with having an ashtray just out of eye line.
I proudly tell people, 'I have no computer,' so as not to be ashamed of having no computer.
A 'human right' is, by definition, timeless. It cannot adhere to some societies and not others, at some times and not at other times.
What is the society we wish to protect? Is it the society of complete surveillance for the commonwealth? Is this the wealth we seek to have in common - optimal security at the cost of maximal surveillance?
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.
My scripts are possibly too talkative. Sometimes I watch a scene I've written, and occasionally I think, 'Oh, for God's sake, shut up.'
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.
Like almost everything else from the West, the Romantic Revolution arrived late in Russia.
When I was 20, in 1957, and maybe you would say I was old enough to know better, but nevertheless, I was completely nuts about Buddy Holly. And I loved pop bands that had absolutely no intellectual pretensions whatsoever. I loved the Monkees.
Theatre probably originated without texts, but by the time we get to the classical Greek period, theatre has become text-based.
I think journalism is important.
I'm not like some other writers: I have no actual urgent need or desire to add to what's written. You write it; if you're lucky, it's performed, and that's the end of the whole thing.
I feel that when I began writing, I had a need to know more about the play before I got into it. I think that's the way I was thinking. But my actual experience is that the best way to find out what the structure is, is by writing the play out laterally. You just have got to be brave enough to start without knowing where you are going.
If you don't know what is being said, the rest of the actor's work is wasted.
If you are well known at something else, you get points for doing stuff which lots of other people do, and much more, and they don't get any points at all. You get over-praised, over-credited.
I'm not one of those writers who insist they don't read reviews and don't care much about them. I do read them, and I do care about them, and they're not always what you want them to be in an ideal world.
You are the plays you write. How on earth could you write them otherwise? They're projections of your own predilections.
With plays that require any kind of reading program, I'm reading for a couple of years before using the material.
I don't know that I want to share all my most intimate secrets.
It is easily and often overlooked that when Thomas Jefferson asserted that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness were inalienable human rights, he did so on the ground that they had been endowed by God, our Creator.
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.
'Shakespeare in Love' was a particularly happy film.
A writer doesn't really have much of a function on a movie set.
I think probably I've been influenced by Chekhov and Walt Disney, if you see what I mean.
The way 'star' used to be reserved for a small number of people, and when the star category became so vast, they came up with 'superstar,' and then they came up with 'megastar.'
It's very common for people to recommend something to me because they're going on what I've already written, when, what really is the case, is that you want to write about something you haven't written about, in ways that you haven't done before.
Despite the digital age, there is a very large number of venues and spaces that are looking for plays, and many of them are looking for new plays.
The whole excitement for writing anything is quite intense. And for a day or two, you think you've done everything extremely well. The problems start on the third day, and continues for the rest of your life.
It's really hard to talk about writing, and I'm usually conscious if I'm misleading people or misleading the questioner, because the problem with writing is the next line.
My father was a doctor in Moravia, in the south of the country. There were a number of Jewish doctors in the hospital there, and at a certain point - almost too late, really, but in time - they were all sent overseas by their employer.
When Auden said his poetry didn't save one Jew from the gas chamber, he'd said it all.
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.
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.
I like plays where people talk a lot. Conversation is sustained. Argument is sustained.
I have two garden parties a year to avoid going out to dinner.
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.
The idea that being human and having rights are equivalent - that rights are inherent - is unintelligible in a Darwinian world.
Nobody would be killed on the roads if the speed limit were 10 miles an hour.
One of the nice things about the world of filmmaking is that you make friends in the business. Sometimes directors feel a script needs something, but they're not sure what it is, so they show it to a friend; if the friend is a writer, he ends up kicking around with that script for a while.
In Chekhov, everything blends into its opposite, just fractionally, and this is sort of unsettling. And that's why you end up 100 years later asking, 'Is that moment tragic or comic?'
Chekhov understood that people are mysterious and can't be reduced to what we nowadays call 'motivation.'
When I was a reporter in Bristol, which I was between the years 1954 and 1960, the newspaper would get tickets for whoever showed up to play a gig at the big hall down the road, so I saw some wonderful people. The Everly Brothers, for example.
Personally, I read reviews because I'm interested by them, but they don't have utility for me.
The possibilities are infinite with new writing; every time you open a new script, there's no limit to what it might contain.
