Words matter. These are the best Patrick Marber Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I don’t feel so alive if I’m not being creative.
I know it’s a film and all of that, and it’s a Hollywood film, but it kind of feels like this sometimes, when you’re in pain and it hurts, and you’re desperate. Or you are about to cross some moral line and it’s so seductive and you just do… and all that.
I have the comedian’s fear of bottles flying. I’ve never been bottled off, but I have had things thrown at me. Bag of crisps. And there’s still a part of me, when I sit in an audience, that thinks people are going to start heckling the play.
I’m a happily married man and I think to get married you have to be optimistic.
Well, you just know, as a writer, I didn’t really write one of the five best screenplays of the year. There were lots of brilliant screenplays; I was just one of the lucky ones who got nominated.
But I think the thing I’m proud of about the film is that there aren’t many films – either independent films or mainstream Hollywood films – that are like this; it’s of its own times, and it’s the film Mike Nichols wanted to make.
I think writing is a glorious and noble thing.
My life is in dialogue with the plays that I write. The relationship I have with my plays is very, very intimate, and I dot my life through them.
I’m a Jew. I think of myself as a Jew first and Englishman second.
The trite answer is that everything is true but none of it happened. It is emotionally true, but the events, the plotting, the narrative, isn’t true of my life, though I’ve experienced most of the emotions experienced by the characters in the play.
When I’m on a train and see an empty pitch, it gives me a certain pleasure that I can’t quite describe. It’s to do with potential.
A couple of flop plays, a death in the family, and it could all collapse.
I come back to the theatre happily knowing that while it won’t make me rich, it will provide me with fun.
I used to go with my parents and loved it, I was in school plays, and I started reading plays before I started reading novels. I’ll defend it to the hilt. When theatre is good it is fabulous.
My whole life has a Jewish flavour.
Most of what I write is comedy.
Always when I directed the play, I was always trying to cast people not who were necessarily like the characters, but people who I felt had the essential component that the character had, some kind of soul for it.
Great comedy is always sadistic.
When I couldn’t write, I felt like a zombie.
In 2012, I really thought, ‘That’s it. It’s over. I’ve written what I can write.’
I like them all – I don’t always approve. I see myself as a sort of benevolent uncle to these characters, and I can see why they do what they do; sometimes they make some mistakes, but at heart I think they’re decent.
I’m a Golden Globe nominee, yes. It’s very nice. It’s a very nice thing, but I kind of think of all the awards I wasn’t ever nominated for, for years and things.
I hoped the dramatic power of the play would rest on that tension between elegant structure – the underlying plan is that you see the first and last meeting of every couple in the play – and inelegant emotion.
Enough people like me. Enough to let me sleep at night.
But I’m the sort of person who, if certain structures topple, it could all go horribly wrong.
I’m constantly having to be vigilant with a depressive tendency, an addictive tendency.
Oh, I would love to be in Don Juan’s shoes for a weekend. Not that I was ever handsome enough to be a Don Juan.
I dispute that ‘Closer’ is about betrayal. Betrayal is one of the elements.
I have made a decision that in future, I will only take on movies that have a better than 75 per cent chance of being made, and that’s not easy.
When you’re in your early 20s your love life seems to explode every 20 minutes or so. By the time you’ve reached your thirties, it is every five or ten years.
I don’t try to be likeable. The worst thing people do is present versions of themselves to the world that aren’t real.
Theatre is how I first encountered art on any level.
A part of me would like to see the money go to hospitals or housing, but I have benefited so greatly from funding for the National Theatre, which has been incredible.
