You make love like a wounded panther. You are like a paintshop on fire.
Sudden resolutions, like the sudden rise of mercury in a barometer, indicate little else than the variability of the weather.
Smiles are the language of love.
The theatre is the best way of showing the gap between what is said and what is seen to be done, and that is why, ragged and gap-toothed as it is, it has still a far healthier potential than some poorer, abandoned arts.
If you kill a character people feel sad. That’s too easy.
Never take advice from anyone with no investment in the outcome.
Style is the art of getting yourself out of the way, not putting yourself in it.
Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.
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.