The most dementing of all modern sins: the inability to distinguish excellence from success.
I fell into writing plays by accident. But the reason I write plays is that it’s the only thing I’m any good at.
One of the things I find about getting older is that I seem to get louder, more voluble; that I constantly have to walk around repressing my vitality.
I believe love opens people up.
I actually think love changes everything. I think it’s the only thing worth having.
I never used to kill characters, because I thought killing characters was cheating.
The majority don’t like me before the curtain goes up, and I always have to win them.
I have a very, very good relationship with 10 percent of the audience. The only purpose of art is intimacy. That’s the only point.
The orthodoxy of America is as rigid as that of Soviet Russia. There is one point of view allowed. If you start a conversation from another point of view, the words dry in your mouth.
I’m not good at standing on platforms and persuading people to my political point of view. Nor would I seek to. My gift is completely different. It’s for presenting an imaginative version of the world which I hope people would recognize and be affected by.
For a politician, the mans to power is paramount, and the ideology, in a way, can look after itself; I’m afraid a writer can’t think like that. A writer has to think that it’s more important to be right than to be popular.
What politicians want and what creative writers want will always be profoundly different, because I’m afraid all politicians, of whatever hue, want propaganda, and writers want the truth, and they’re not compatible.
When you get older, then you feel death not at the end of the road, but death all around you, in everything. Life is saturated with death. I feel death everywhere.
If you like judging, please: be a lawyer. Run a dog show. There’s a whole lot of jobs if judging is your passion in life. But take my advice: if you want to be happy, keep your judging professional. And don’t start putting in practice at home.
No single move traps the king.
I love you, for God’s sake. I still love you. I loved you more than anyone on earth. But I’ll never trust you, after what happened. It’s what Alice said. You’ll never grow up. There is no peace in you.
Dear Leonard. To look life in the face, always, to look life in the face and to know it for what it is. At last to know it, to love it for what it is, and then, to put it away. Leonard, always the years between us, always the years. Always the love. Always the hours.
America is a crippled giant, England is a sick gnome.
As Michael Cunningham would later write in his novel The Hours, I thought what I was feeling was the beginning of happiness. In fact, it was happiness.
If anything has been my salvation as a human being it is this choice of an activity which is, at the deepest level, out of my hands. What a relief! What a blessing! Better still, it had always been a drawback to see life differently from other people. In childhood, it had brought me little but heartache. Now I had stumbled on a profession in which it was an asset. 7 Five Good Scenes At the Royal Court, at any one moment, we had stacks of plays being considered.