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

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.

There is no executive order; there is no law that can require the American people to form a national community. This we must do as individuals and if we do it as individuals, there is no President of the United States who can veto that decision.

Young people discovering their sexuality must know they walk with a strong tradition and that they are not alone. They have a right to information without being pressured.

Many are needed to plant and water what has been planted now that the faith has spread so far and there are so many people... No matter who plants or waters, God gives no harvest unless what is planted is the faith of Peter and unless he agrees to his teachings.

DJs and people in the street know what they like.

People who keep stiff upper lips find that it's damn hard to smile.

Some people are directors and I think they should stay behind the camera.

We dominated Survivor - there is no way we would not dominate that, too. I can see it already, us making deals with people. That's the best part, and with the Race, it would be even more fun because I've got a lot of tricks up my sleeve.

I'm getting a wider circle of fans now. More women, more middle class people.

We must support initiatives that provide clear, concrete measures and milestones that our troops need for defeating the insurgency, building up Iraqi security forces, and handing over Iraq to the Iraqi people.

Yeah, that's what kind of, we get the idea a little bit yeah, because other people from different countries also try as hard as they can to get a medal or a gold medal in the Olympic Games. And you know, if they can work hard, we can work hard as well.

Well concerning the world records that I did, I think it helps a lot to me, yeah. I think it's a very individual thing because I heard some people say, like, oh I don't like it at all. But I definitely, for me it really made a big difference.

My goal is, of course, for this show to do well, and I would love it if people liked it.

I hate wasting people's time.

Religions get lost as people do.

I also do not like the idea of soft money, these issue ads - people don't know where the money is coming from, millions and millions of dollars outside of the control of a candidate - there's no accountability.