My actual childhood, as opposed to my adolescence, was not spent in London.

I really believe that studying organization, even in the form of studying detective story organization, is very, very valuable for a playwright, a budding playwright.

Black Comedy is a farce that is played in the dark, as you know, with the lights full on. It's the Chinese convention of reversing light and dark, and exactly where anybody is at any given moment is the play.

It's an extraordinary thing about Mozart is that you never tire of him... he never bores me, and he doesn't... not only bore me, that's too strong a word.

I was born in Liverpool in England, and I lived there for the first nine years of my life.

Passion, you see, can be destroyed by a doctor. It cannot be created.

We... our war began September the 3rd 1939, with the invasion of Poland by Germany, and thereafter the great state of danger in England at that time, with the bombings, necessitated the evacuation of children.

Librarians as a race tend to be tedious.

I think people nowadays do tend to blame their parents for everything.

It is very, very difficult for a playwright to write a scene in which a young man has his first deep experience of sex with a girl whom he found immensely attractive, is fully satisfied by this event and gets up and blinds a lot of horses.

They look so expectant, and then they look so depressed... that was the other great lesson that The Royal Hunt of the Sun taught me, it was the profundity that masked drama can achieve, that of course, the audience were not seeing masks moving at all.

But the first published thing I did was a detective story, detective novel, and I did that on my own.

You can't always let people do their own thing.

Rehearsing a play is making the word flesh. Publishing a play is reversing the process.

I think plays, like books, are endemic. They grow out of the soil of the writer and the place he's writing about. I think, you just can't move them about, you know.

If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting.

And in fact, I think one of the best guides to telling you who you are, and I think children use it all the time for this purpose, is fantasy.

I made, over the years in Cambridge, several very good American friends, and America appeared to me, a land of promise in every sense of that word, a land of freedom from the inhibitions and restrictions that I felt in England.

I think I did have fantasies about being an actor. In fact, I know I did.

You never quite know what's going to strike your imagination, or something that won't going to leave you alone, not going to leave alone, and this was one for me.

Tragedy, for me, is not a conflict between right and wrong, but between two different kinds of right.

Everything we feel is made of Time. All the beauties of life are shaped by it.

I think possibly the first film that has music as its leading character.

My actual childhood, as opposed to my adolescence, was not spent in London.

Watching Italian opera, all those male sopranos screeching, stupid fat couples rolling their eyes about. That's not love, it's just rubbish.

I was an accomplice in my own frustration.

Art and literature are my surrogate religions.

I discover what I mean as I write. That can be both terrifically exciting and very dangerous, because when you look at your words later, you wonder, 'Did I really mean that, or am I just making verbal patterns?'

In London, 'Equus' caused a sensation because it displayed cruelty to horses; in New York, because it allegedly displayed cruelty to psychiatrists.

Our function as playwrights to some extent is to make audiences see with their ears, because films make us see with our eyes much better.

The conquistadors and their followers were very rough people, and they were fixated on gold and silver. They were oblivious to the astonishing achievements of the Inca civilisation.

The rhetoric is the key to the character. It's the verbal music of the piece.

Things rust, you know, like the heart. My cardiologist said, 'It's a pump; use it - that's the sole advice I've got to give you.' It's the same in playwriting. Don't theorise about it. Do it.

The trouble is if you don't spend your life yourself, other people spend it for you.

Friendships in childhood are usually a matter of chance, whereas in adolescence they are most often a matter of choice.

Premature burial works just fine as a cure for adolescence.

Children, even infants, are capable of sympathy. But only after adolescence are we capable of compassion.

I had very few friends. We always ate dinner with our parents. We didn't want to go out. American adolescence was a lot wilder than I would have felt comfortable with.

Even as kids reach adolescence, they need more than ever for us to watch over them. Adolescence is not about letting go. It's about hanging on during a very bumpy ride.

Well, I had this little notion - I started writing when I was eleven, writing poetry. I was passionately addicted to it; it was my great refuge through adolescence.

Maturity is only a short break in adolescence.

With any child entering adolescence, one hunts for signs of health, is desperate for the smallest indication that the child's problems will never be important enough for a television movie.

Adolescence as the time when an individual 'recapitulates' the savage stage of the race's past.

Hemingway never grew out of adolescence. His scope and depth stayed shallow because he had no idea what women are for.

Criticism starts - it has to start - with a real passion for reading. It can come in adolescence, even in your twenties, but you must fall in love with poems.

Adolescence is when girls experience social pressure to put aside their authentic selves and to display only a small portion of their gifts.

The four stages of man are infancy, childhood, adolescence, and obsolescence.

Adolescence is just one big walking pimple.

I'm quite comfortable looking at myself in movies, probably because I've been doing it for so long, since I was a kid. So I sort of watched myself grow up and go through adolescence, like, basically on camera.