One of the depressing things in England is the total orthodoxy: the law is handed down from Downing Street.
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.
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.