I think I enlist comedy to a serious purpose.
— Tom Stoppard
My intention still is to write a play to commemorate, possibly rather skeptically, the 50th anniversary of the Russian revolution. I started it at the beginning of 1966, but confronted with the enormous importance and reality of that revolution, I absolutely boggle. I don't know what to do about it.
Although I don't examine myself in this respect, I would say, off the top of my head, that I've come to acknowledge my Czechness more as I get older.
You end up going to school plays quite a bit as a parent, there are a lot of kids who are doing the job as well as they can, but there's always one or two who seem much more at home in the world of impersonation.
To be in love with Debo Devonshire is hardly a distinction.
I don't feel that I belong anywhere. Or rather, if there's a place I belong, I don't feel I'm there.
I seem to be failing in my intention to be as boring as I possibly can be for self-protection.
I don't want to come over as some boringly self-deprecating person. But I don't see myself as a groundbreaking writer in the way plays are structured.
One of the attractions of translating 'Heroes' is that it's not the kind of play that I write. If it had been, I probably wouldn't have wanted to translate it. There are no one-liners. It's much more a truthful comedy than a play of dazzling wit.
I like trying to create a spark through a collaboration between me and the audience.
I adopted England as least as much as England adopted me.
I barely remembered my father; I'm confused between genuine memory and the few photographs that survived.
The more doors there are for you to open, the better the play.
'Arcadia' is obviously a play that's got interesting things in it that are perhaps quite hard to grasp.
Writing a new play shouldn't be seen as a mystery belonging to a priesthood, but as a challenge, a technical challenge, just to get into it.
Theater is still a medium which attracts young writers. You'd think that it would be all over by now, with television and film. But it's not.
I consider myself to be a very fortunate person and to have led a very fortunate life.
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.
I wanted to be in the theater. It is simply the way I felt.
I went to an English school and was brought up in English. So I don't feel Czech.
I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you're dead.
Hotel rooms inhabit a separate moral universe.
I don't respond well to the Olympic noise, which is the noise of nationalistic triumphalism.
I think I'm a difficult conventional writer.
Corporeal death is not the whole story.
As a child, I was airlifted out of the path of the Nazis. Unfortunately, I was parachuted into the path of the Japanese, but then I was airlifted again to India.
I don't even know what my voice is to this day.
One senses that all the Bolsheviks, even those who ended up as cold-blooded autocrats, had been on a journey from idealism to something else, and didn't notice - to mix periods - when the Rubicon was crossed.
Chekhov was capable of casually tossing off deplorable comments in his letters, combined with a very modern anger against anti-Semitism.
The thing that happens remarkably often is that the people who are writing a dissertation believe they need to speak to me in order to do their dissertation. They need to interview me.
'The Importance of Being Earnest' is important, but it says nothing about anything.
I'm aware of my old plays and occasionally think about them, but I'm much more anxious about finding the next play.
I don't act, I don't direct, I don't design.
I write scenes - often quite long scenes - mainly because I still get seduced into writing six lines where one and a half will do.
In my mind, I always knew what my father looked like.
Like most writers, I just create because I have a story to tell, really.
When 'The Dark Side of the Moon' was a new album in 1973, a friend of mine walked into my room where I was working with a copy in his hand and said, 'You really have to do a play about this album.'
Childhood is Last Chance Gulch for happiness. After that, you know too much.
If an idea's worth having once, it's worth having twice.
I don't feel like a Londoner.
I'm a playwright who gets involved in movies when I'm not writing a play.
You should not translate for more than two hours at a time. After that, you lose your edge, the language becomes clumsy, rigid.
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.
The idea that anybody might be allowed to use their common sense when clearly no harm is being done is part of history now.
The notion that the 'leader' has the right to ask huge sacrifices of your generation for a notional future paradise - if you'd be good enough to lie down under the wheels of the juggernaut - that sentimental and self-aggrandising rationalisation for brute force and cowardice I felt from adolescence was wrong.
I'm not a theoretician about playwriting, but I have a strong sense that plays have to be pitched - the scene, the line, the word - at the exact point where the audience has just the right amount of information. It's like Occam's razor.
If Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of 22, it would have changed the history of music and of aviation.
If I had been asked to write 1,200 words for a newspaper tomorrow, on any subject, I would just do it rather than leave a white hole in the page. And I think it's a very healthy attitude to take to writing anything.
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.
When I think of how things could have turned out, I feel as if I've dodged, not just bullets, but 6mm shells.
