The nearest my parents came to alcohol was at Holy Communion and they utterly overestimated its effects. However bad the weather, Dad never drove to church because Mam thought the sacrament might make him incapable on the return journey.
I’m not good at precise, coherent argument. But plays are suited to incoherent argument, put into the mouths of fallible people.
It’s the one species I wouldn’t mind seeing vanish from the face of the earth. I wish they were like the White Rhinosix of them left in the Serengeti National Park, and all males.
The Breed never dies. Sapper, Buchan, Dornford Yates, practitioners in that school of Snobbery withViolence that runs like a thread of good-class tweed through twentieth-century literature.
There is no such thing as a good script, onlya good film, and I’m conscious that my scripts often read better than they play.
Memories are not shackles, Franklin, they are garlands.
So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.
It’s subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.
All the effort went into getting there and then I had nothing left. I thought I’d got somewhere, then I found I had to go on.
I saw someone peeing in Jermym Street the other day. I thought, is this the end of civilization as we know it? Or is it simply someone peeing in Jermyn Street?
God doesn’t do notes, either. Did Jesus Christ say, “Can I be excused the Crucifixion?” No!
It was the kind of library he had only read about in books.
If I am doing nothing, I like to be doing nothing to some purpose. That is what leisure means.
Nature played a cruel trick on her by giving her a waxed mustache.
Life is generally something that happens elsewhere.
Had your forefathers, Wigglesworth, been as stupid as you are, the human race would never have succeeded in procreating itself.
Those who have known the famous are publicly debriefed of their memories, knowing as their own dusk falls that they will only be remembered for remembering someone else.
I’m not “happy” but I’m not unhappy about it.
Your whole life is on the other side of the glass. And there is nobody watching.
We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.