I’m vey bad at marshaling arguments. I can’t, at a dinner party, explain why I’m a socialist and why others should be socialists as well.
Thought is the wind and knowledge the sail.
No one but a fool is always right.
Weak minds sink under prosperity as well as adversity; but strong and deep ones have two high tides.
I think the novel is the American form because people read it in private, and the only valuable things that happen in America happen in private life, because public life is a dead loss.
In those days, the early 1980s, TV and film were interchangeable.
The actual business of writing dialogue is not thought of as a craft.
I don’t see the theater as an establishment. The National Theatre has always seemed to me a people’s theater. It was never meant to reinforce the values of the government of the day, nor does it, nor should it.
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.