A weak mind sinks under prosperity, as well as under adversity. A strong and deep mind has two highest tides – when the moon is at the full, and when there is no moon.
Sudden resolutions, like the sudden rise of mercury in a barometer, indicate little else than the variability of the weather.
The one thing that Via Dolorosa has is no opinions. To me, curiosity is 50 times as valuable as opinion.
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.
The great mystery of adaptation is that true fidelity can only be achieved through lavish promiscuity.
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.
The most important playwright’s gift is to hit your time and speak to your time.
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.
Obviously VIA DOLOROSA is completely artificial. It is as highly wrought as any of my plays. But basically all the artifice is to disguise itself so you don’t feel it’s there. You’re attempting to make the artifice like a pane of glass that simply leads you through to the subject – not to decorate the bloody glass.
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.
To those whose God is honor; only disgrace is a sin.
Style is the art of getting yourself out of the way, not putting yourself in it.
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