Theatre is a series of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.
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.
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.
Honesty is seldom ingratiating and often discomfiting.
I don’t keep a diary and I throw away nearly all the paper I might have kept. I don’t keep an archive. There’s something worrying about my make-up that I try to leave no trace of myself apart from my plays.
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.
I don’t know that I want to share all my most intimate secrets.
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.
I write for film or, in this case, television when I haven’t got a play cooking.
I’ve voted in every election – not always for the same political party and never with any degree of enthusiasm.
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’m attracted to the past.
Responsibilities gravitate to the person who can shoulder them.
I am as miserable as anyone – sometimes.
I’m vaguely embarrassed by myself sometimes.
For a long time I managed to think two things simultaneously, that I am actually a good playwright, and that the next time I write a play I will be revealed as someone who is no good at all.
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.
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.
‘Shakespeare in Love’ was a particularly happy film.
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.
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.
One doesn’t want one’s democracy to behave like a dictatorial or fascistic police. One doesn’t.
Other people’s lives come at us without a backstory most of the time. The present is like that.
Life in a box is better than no life at all… I expect.
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.
I like trying to create a spark through a collaboration between me and the audience.
I’m offended by things and take pathetic little stands against them.
Fatherlessness didn’t strike me as being an event. It was a state of life.
I went to an English school and was brought up in English. So I don’t feel Czech.
I think I’m a difficult conventional writer.
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.
We give advice by the bucket, but take it by the grain.
The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means.
I write plays because writing dialogue is the only respectable way of contradicting yourself. I put a position, rebut it, refute the rebuttal, and rebut the refutation.
I’m very unhappy about my entire life if my writing is going wrong.
My life feels, week to week, incomplete to the level of being pointless if I am not in preparation for the next play or, ideally, into it.
I’m offended by things and take pathetic little stands against them.
I think journalism is important.
Any revival in which I am involved is liable to change.
The days of the digital watch are numbered.
The days of the digital watch are numbered.
I think I enlist comedy to a serious purpose.
Schepisi is the sort of director who could, would, and frequently did phone me whenever he came across a textual problem.
Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.
There are many, many more small theater spaces than there were when I was starting out.
I think theater ought to be theatrical.
I still believe that if your aim is to change the world, journalism is a more immediate short-term weapon.
My brain cells are dying in their trillions.
The fact is, I loved being English. I was very happy to be turned into an English schoolboy.
I like the notion of theater as recreational.
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.
Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.
Good things, when short, are twice as good.
Well I believe in the desirability of an optimal society.
I seem to be failing in my intention to be as boring as I possibly can be for self-protection.
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.
The fact is that people are attracted to new work and by new work.
I consider myself to be a very fortunate person and to have led a very fortunate life.
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.
I barely remembered my father; I’m confused between genuine memory and the few photographs that survived.
The truth of the matter is that I used to be much more – as it were – shy. Now I don’t care!
I think age is a very high price to pay for maturity.
I still believe that if your aim is to change the world, journalism is a more immediate short-term weapon.
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.
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.
Like most writers, I just create because I have a story to tell, really.
The idea that being human and having rights are equivalent – that rights are inherent – is unintelligible in a Darwinian world.
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.
It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it’s a painting, and if you can walk around it it’s a sculpture.
Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering.
A healthy attitude is contagious but don’t wait to catch it from others. Be a carrier.
If you don’t know what is being said, the rest of the actor’s work is wasted.
Somebody who likes to do my plays is a good director for them.
I flinch when I see my name in the newspapers.
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 proudly tell people, ‘I have no computer,’ so as not to be ashamed of having no computer.
If I hadn’t left Czechoslovakia, I would have been dead.
Because theatre is a story-telling art form, we feel entitled to assume that the playwright got there before we got there.
I like pop music. I consider rock ‘n’ roll to be a branch of pop music.
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.
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.
A movie camera is like having someone you have a crush on watching you from afar – you pretend it’s not there.
‘Arcadia’ is obviously a play that’s got interesting things in it that are perhaps quite hard to grasp.
