Every exit is an entry somewhere else.
Tom Stoppard
It's not the voting that's democracy; it's the counting.
If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older.
A healthy attitude is contagious but don't wait to catch it from others. Be a carrier.
Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.
I still believe that if your aim is to change the world, journalism is a more immediate short-term weapon.
Maturity is a high price to pay for growing up.
All your life, you live so close to truth, it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye. And when something nudges it into outline, it is like being ambushed by a grotesque.
Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.
We're actors. We're the opposite of people.
Responsibilities gravitate to the person who can shoulder them.
Hotel rooms inhabit a separate moral universe.
Good things, when short, are twice as good.
Obviously, you would give your life for your children, or give them the last biscuit on the plate. But to me, the trick in life is to take that sense of generosity between kin, make it apply to the extended family and to your neighbour, your village and beyond.
I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you're dead.
Life is a gamble, at terrible odds - if it was a bet you wouldn't take it.
It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.
The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means.
The whole notion of journalism being an institution whose fundamental purpose is to educate and inform and even, one might say, elevate, has altered under commercial pressure, perhaps, into a different kind of purpose, which is to divert and distract and entertain.
We give advice by the bucket, but take it by the grain.
Life in a box is better than no life at all... I expect.
I consider myself to be a very fortunate person and to have led a very fortunate life.
The more doors there are for you to open, the better the play.
The House of Lords, an illusion to which I have never been able to subscribe - responsibility without power, the prerogative of the eunuch throughout the ages.
Childhood is Last Chance Gulch for happiness. After that, you know too much.
Honesty is seldom ingratiating and often discomfiting.
Eternity's a terrible thought. I mean, where's it all going to end?
I think age is a very high price to pay for maturity.
My whole life is waiting for the questions to which I have prepared answers.
For me, human rights simply endorse a view of life and a set of moral values that are perfectly clear to an eight-year-old child. A child knows what is fair and isn't fair, and justice derives from that knowledge.
I'm a conservative kind of person. I don't think rightwing is quite the same thing. But I acknowledge my conservatism of temperament.
I am not a mathematician, but I was aware that for centuries, mathematics was considered the queen of the sciences because it claimed certainty. It was grounded on some fundamental certainties - axioms - that led to others.
I write plays because writing dialogue is the only respectable way of contradicting yourself. I put a position, rebut it, refute the rebuttal, and rebut the refutation.
I think... the history of civilization is an attempt to codify, classify and categorize aspects of human nature that hardly lend themselves to that process.
The whole philosophy of modern times is to dissolve distinctions between individuals and deal with them as large collections of people. It's essentially self-interested on the part of authority.
When Auden said his poetry didn't save one Jew from the gas chamber, he'd said it all.
You can't but know that if you can capture the emotions of the audience as well as their minds, the play will work better, because it's a narrative art form.
The thing about talking about human rights is that when one bears in mind the sharp end of it, one does not want to worry too much about semantics.
Theater in New York is nearer to the street. In London, you have to go deep into the building, usually, to reach the place where theater happens. On Broadway, only the fire doors separate you from the sidewalk, and you're lucky if the sound of a police car doesn't rip the envelope twice a night.
The notion that the 'leader' has the right to ask huge sacrifices of your generation for a notional future paradise - if you'd be good enough to lie down under the wheels of the juggernaut - that sentimental and self-aggrandising rationalisation for brute force and cowardice I felt from adolescence was wrong.
Because theatre is a story-telling art form, we feel entitled to assume that the playwright got there before we got there.
What Tolstoy is on about is that carnal love is not a good idea.
I don't feel that I belong anywhere. Or rather, if there's a place I belong, I don't feel I'm there.
It is better to be quotable than to be honest.
Theatre is a series of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.
The idea that being human and having rights are equivalent - that rights are inherent - is unintelligible in a Darwinian world.
I think probably I've been influenced by Chekhov and Walt Disney, if you see what I mean.
'Shakespeare in Love' was a particularly happy film.
If Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of 22, it would have changed the history of music and of aviation.
I never had any frustration about writing uncredited. I always felt that the satisfaction of doing it was in the doing of it, really, and getting recognised by the small number of people that know what you did.
