Why should I write a play? I don't have to write a play, do I? But somehow, I think that's what I'm here for, so I'd better do it.
— Tom Stoppard
Other people's lives come at us without a backstory most of the time. The present is like that.
People have quite a simple idea about 'Anna Karenina.' They feel that the novel is entirely about a young married woman who falls in love with a cavalry officer and leaves her husband after much agony, and pays the price for that.
Rewriting isn't just about dialogue; it's the order of the scenes, how you finish a scene, how you get into a scene.
I actually went to an Oasis concert. I thought they were a brilliant songwriting band.
I am not a mathematician, but I was aware that for centuries, mathematics was considered the queen of the sciences because it claimed certainty. It was grounded on some fundamental certainties - axioms - that led to others.
Schepisi is the sort of director who could, would, and frequently did phone me whenever he came across a textual problem.
Pink Floyd are one of a handful of bands I've listened to a lot and whose concerts I've been to. I love the experience. I don't dance; I just jig up and down like everybody else.
Chekhov directors and Chekhov actors love working on his plays because there seems to be no end to what you can find out about the micro-narrative when you're investigating a text.
Like many people, I only knew of Ford Madox Ford through a book called 'The Good Soldier,' which is everybody's favorite Ford Madox Ford if they have one, but I came to read 'Parade's End' when it was suggested via Damien Timmer of Mammoth Screen.
I'm good at being funny.
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.
If I see an actor in a role that is really terrifying, no matter how many times I meet him socially, I'm still frightened of him. I think he's going to hit me.
I think of myself as a theater animal instead of an intellectual animal.
Embarrassingly enough, I often can't remember how I came to write something.
I was an awful critic. I operated on the assumption that there was an absolute scale of values against which art could be measured. I didn't trust my own subjective responses.
For me, the reputation for teaching language in general, and East European languages most particularly, gave Glasgow University, and by reflection the country, a distinction.
Honesty is seldom ingratiating and often discomfiting.
In January 1962, when I was the author of one and a half unperformed plays, I attended a student production of 'The Birthday Party' at the Victoria Rooms in Bristol. Just before it began, I realised that Harold Pinter was sitting in front of me.
I would count myself as a friend of Vaclav Havel.
I am good at being shown something and counterpunching.
I loved the Beatles when they turned up, and the Stones when they turned up, and never really stopped liking them.
I like dialogue that is slightly more brittle than life. I have always admired and wished to write one of those 1940s film scripts where every line is written with a sharpness and economy that is frankly artificial.
I don't believe there is something called 'film' and something called 'theater,' and that words belong in the theater. Some rather bad films have few words in them; some good films have a lot of words in them.
In the end, my children put me on to Pink Floyd when they were teenagers.
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.
A free press needs to be a respected press.
I'm not that taken with Freudian perspectives. They seem to be overcomplicated.
I am not somebody who meets a man or a woman somewhere and feels like that is an incredible character that I must write into a play.
I once did a radio program with a famous materialist, that is to say a scientist who believed that absolutely everything was physical and that all emotions were reductive to little electrical impulses in your neurons. And I found that I didn't believe that. But what the emotions really are, I don't have an alternative theory.
I think... the history of civilization is an attempt to codify, classify and categorize aspects of human nature that hardly lend themselves to that process.
I am as miserable as anyone - sometimes.
I have about a dozen cassettes lying about which I use in random order. Very often, I pick up a cassette to dictate a letter, and I find my voice coming back at me with the lines of plays three years old.
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.
Because theatre is a story-telling art form, we feel entitled to assume that the playwright got there before we got there.
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.
I just happen to know quite a lot of what happened in Czechoslovakia between 1968 and the fall of Communism.
You don't often get a proposal to do Tolstoy for a really interesting director - that's easy to say yes to.
Theater in New York is nearer to the street. In London, you have to go deep into the building, usually, to reach the place where theater happens. On Broadway, only the fire doors separate you from the sidewalk, and you're lucky if the sound of a police car doesn't rip the envelope twice a night.
In 2005, I got an email from Belarus Free Theatre. They were emailing playwrights in America and England announcing their existence and saying they would like support from us. I wrote back and asked if they wanted us to visit. They said, 'Yes, we'd love that.'
I'm very garrulous, but I don't say anything.
There are many, many more small theater spaces than there were when I was starting out.
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.
A publisher many years ago asked if I'd like to write a novel for £50. And I said, 'Absolutely.'
I can be affectionate about a lot of things without watching them.
I don't look at my work in a critical or analytical way; I just don't think of myself objectively. It doesn't interest me.
I think I give the impression of being a romantic, and I think inside I'm quite severe. But some might say they had the opposite impression of me.
I get the impression sometimes that a play arrives in a sequence of events that I have no control over.
There are certain sorts of jokes which have only to do with the substitution of the unexpected word in a familiar context. If you translated something into French and then had it translated back into English by somebody who didn't know the original, you'd lose what was funny.
One always likes to think that other countries are not like one's own.
