If I am on a journey where I only have time to read one-and-a-half books, I never know which one-and-a-half I'll feel like reading. So I bring eight.
— Tom Stoppard
The text loses its virginity simply by being staged: it's no longer the abstract ideal version; it's an event.
When I was younger, I could do something useful just by being free for half a day, but now I need five days to get the world I've left out of my head and ten days or a fortnight not talking to anyone to hold what I need to hold inside my head.
My life is sectioned off into hot flushes, pursuits of this or that.
I don't do interviews under false pretenses.
I don't draw on my inner life in my work.
I'm not interested in clothes; I just like them.
One feels that the past stays the way you left it, whereas the present is in constant movement; it's unstable all around you.
To be 64 is appalling, so what does it matter being 65?
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.
There are too many things I find it difficult to say 'no' to.
All your life, you live so close to truth, it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye. And when something nudges it into outline, it is like being ambushed by a grotesque.
When I was 20, the idea of having a play on anywhere was just beyond my dreams.
People think I'm very nice, you know. And I'm not as nice as they think.
I want to support the whole idea of the humanities and teaching the humanities as being something that - even if it can't be quantitatively measured as other subjects - it's as fundamental to all education.
I have a spasm of envy for the person that was killed by a falling bookcase, as long as it doesn't happen prematurely.
I don't think falling in love in Slovakia is much different from falling in love in Tunbridge Wells.
It's so great in the theater when everyone catches up on the truth.
One of the reasons why there are so many versions of Chekhov is that translations date in a way that the original doesn't; translations seem to be of their time.
I always loved rock 'n' roll.
I flinch when I see my name in the newspapers.
In the end, one has to feel lucky that things fell out O.K. I've felt that all the years I've been writing plays.
Quite early on, and certainly since I started writing, I found that philosophical questions occupied me more than any other kind. I hadn't really thought of them as being philosophical questions, but one rapidly comes to an understanding that philosophy's only really about two questions: 'What is true?' and 'What is good?'
Lou Reed was a hero because he was an anti-hero.
I've voted in every election - not always for the same political party and never with any degree of enthusiasm.
If I hadn't left Czechoslovakia, I would have been dead.
For me, human rights simply endorse a view of life and a set of moral values that are perfectly clear to an eight-year-old child. A child knows what is fair and isn't fair, and justice derives from that knowledge.
I wish I could remember how to write a play. I can't remember how they happened.
Theatre is a series of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.
My brain cells are dying in their trillions.
I'm very unhappy about my entire life if my writing is going wrong.
The printed word is no longer as in demand as when I was of the age of pupils or even at the age of the teachers teaching them.
Everybody I know is writing plays twice a year. It's sort of making me feel I am not up to much.
What Tolstoy is on about is that carnal love is not a good idea.
Directors sometimes have good ideas that I wished I'd had, not on rewriting but simply on staging.
If I wanted to change the world, the last thing I would do is write a play.
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.
It takes a lot of effort to be vibrant.
I like the notion of theater as recreational.
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.
I've never really worked out this thought, and I don't know if I'm really conscious of it, but I can see there's an attraction about writing about a period that's over and isn't going to change colour while you look at it.
My desk faces the water, and I'm perfectly happy sitting there. I'm never lonely.
I don't believe that we evolved moral psychology; it just doesn't seem plausible to me as a biological phenomenon.
The thing about talking about human rights is that when one bears in mind the sharp end of it, one does not want to worry too much about semantics.
When you write, it's making a certain kind of music in your head. There's a rhythm to it, a pulse, and on the whole, I'm writing to that drum rather than the psychological process.
I think theater ought to be theatrical.
I don't find it easy to think of good stuff to write about.
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.
I am aware, as everybody has to be, that there's more competition for one's attention nowadays.
The truth of the matter is that I used to be much more - as it were - shy. Now I don't care!
