A conventional playwright tries to tell you more about the characters than they know about themselves.

Towards the end of the Lord Chamberlain's era, when his hold was being loosened, private prosecutions began to happen. A member of staff at the Royal Court ordered to stop the play, and the police were brought in.

In 1968 the Arts Council managed to get a grant from the treasury to buy up a lot of derelict touring theatres and put them back in the hands of the local authorities.

Lord Chamberlain's readers or controllers, which were a handful of people working directly to him, were a very assorted group of people and some of them tried very hard to be as liberal as they could.

Suddenly we saw that you could do plays about real life, and people had been doing them for some time, but they weren't always getting to the audiences. They were performed in little, tiny, theatres.

You're not allowed to step out of whatever the rules are, politically, or socially, and they'll get you for it, they'll hunt you down. That's the really frightening thing.

The classical writers... playwrights, Jacobean, Elizabethan playwrights, all showed areas of all classes and how they live and painted them pretty authentically.

When you're writing about people that are not very well off, you seem to see the kitchen sink. So it was a bit of a sort of cosy phrase that got used a bit too much.

No producer should revive a play unless they have a very good reason for it. I think there's quite enough about a good play to make it available to new audiences.

The Long and the Short and the Tall made a great impression on me because it was a very ugly tale about the reality of soldiering at a time when we were being gung-ho about the whole thing of war.

The foyers now look ridiculously small to us because not all that many people used them.

Anybody can decide if they have got the money to fight a case if they don't like a particular thing, and they complain to the watch committee, local council or whatever.

I got very cross with the term, kitchen sink. It just meant that you invaded different kinds of houses, where it was very difficult to avoid kitchen sink.

I'm reluctant to use the word class so much.

I don't believe in right-angled turning points.

A conventional playwright tries to tell you more about the characters than they know about themselves.

There was no real fringe theatre in London until way after the war, so either a play was done secretly with a club licence or it was done openly and had to be assessed along with everything else.

There were loads of plays which were very popular before and after the war, where everybody wore a dinner jacket in the third act and it was in a house that you wished you'd owned with people that you wish you knew. It was life seen through a very privileged way.

The newly decorated theatres produced things like car parks and restaurants, so you could have a good night out, quite cheaply without all that bother of having to go somewhere else.

Certain things were deemed to be offensive. It was usually bad language.

What I always do is just look at the players, look at the best 11 they can put on the pitch.

I'm not going to sit here and bash the manager, we have to regroup.

My fate is in the hands of almighty Allah. I will deliver to the Gambian people and if I have to rule this country for one billion years, I will, if Allah says so.

On good teams coaches hold players accountable on great teams players hold players accountable.

Decisions made in anger can yeild a lifetime of regret.

I grew up in a very musical family, my father was a musician and a big band leader and made records.

I loved education, and, yes, I did want to go on learning.

I try and get it right the first time. I may rewrite a sentence four or five times, but I rarely go back and kill a whole page and rewrite it.

The risk of just one terrorist with just one nuclear weapon is a risk we simply cannot afford to take.

I try to leave a light footprint. I'm involved with Global Green, which aims to educate people about sustainable building and the greening of schools. I try to be aware about the consumption of unnecessary things in a consumptive culture.

The motto of west African cooking is that if the food doesn't set fire to the tablecloth the cook is being stingy with the pepper.

I will always try to share my faith with any person who is willing to listen. When I feel a wall go up, we can talk about something else... and I will pray for you.

I'm fighting so I can die a martyr and go to heaven to meet God. Our fight now is against the Americans.

What I wanted to do in rock 'n roll was merge poetry with sonic scapes, and the two people who had contributed so much to that were Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison.

After having dispatched a meal, I went ashore, and found no habitation save a single house, and that without an occupant; we had no doubt that the people had fled in terror at our approach, as the house was completely furnished.

The world breaks everyone, and afterwards many are strong at the broken places.

I think fashion takes itself way too seriously. It's just fashion, people. It's just clothes. It should be frivolous and fun. You're not meant to see it as church and pray to a blouse.

Once you've experienced the warmth of an audience, the achievement of getting your first laugh, and entertaining them, singing or playing piano, it just keeps it all going.

Our job is only to hold up the mirror - to tell and show the public what has happened.

N.W.A were the audio-documentarians of their time. They were trying to shock people with the violence of their language and the subjects they were talking about. The fact that they dressed in guerilla outfits like the Black Panthers made them shocking by their appearance as well.

I've always believed my success in the entertainment business is an inevitability. You have to believe that; you have to be an optimist.

There is, to be sure, sometimes only a small difference between being alert to possible danger and allowing oneself to become terrified to the point of paralysis by seeming or imagined portents.

Good is positive. Evil is merely privative, not absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of heat. All evil is so much death or nonentity. Benevolence is absolute and real. So much benevolence as a man hath, so much life hath he.

Well, we play Country music; we're just not sure what country it is.