Purity is the feminine, truth the masculine of honor.
The one thing that Via Dolorosa has is no opinions. To me, curiosity is 50 times as valuable as opinion.
Via Dolorosa is the only thing I have ever acted in my life, professionally, and Ill never act again.
It’s inevitable that you will die, so the only question is when. The great thrillers are the moments that play and tease with the question, “When will it be?”
The future of American film lies on television.
Are we simply waving farewell to the days when some of the most interesting thinking in Europe and America came to us from our fiction film-makers? BBC2, which once introduced and showed great films, now shows none.
The great mystery of adaptation is that true fidelity can only be achieved through lavish promiscuity.
The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.
Children always turn to the light.
The ultimate tendency of civilization is towards barbarism.
One of the depressing things in England is the total orthodoxy: the law is handed down from Downing Street.
An inability to handle language is not the same thing as stupidity.
Writers always sound insufferably smug when they sit back and assert that their job is only to ask questions and not to answer them. But, in good part, it is true. And once you become committed to one particular answer, your freedom to ask new questions is seriously impaired.
In oratory the will must predominate.
Trying to be a socialist and a libertarian is obviously a very difficult balancing act, which nobody has pulled off too successfully in this century.
The most important playwright’s gift is to hit your time and speak to your time.
As you write plays, you discover what you believe. And until you know what you believe, you can’t write a play.
To those whose God is honor; only disgrace is a sin.
You cant get a contemporary story about what is going on inside government, and how society sees itself, on American TV.
Insofar as I’m good at directing, it’s because I’ve become a writer.