| # | Quote |
|---|
| 1 | I wrote a play about Charles I when I was twelve. It was surprisingly conventional; he died in the end. |
| 2 | The term artist isn't intelligible to me if it doesn't entail making. |
| 3 | I came here [to Britain] when I was eight. Within minutes, it seems to me, I had no sense of being in an alien land and my feelings for English landscape, English architecture, English character, all this, have just somehow become stronger and stronger. |
| 4 | I'm an English middle-class bourgeois, who prefers to read a book to almost anything else. It would be an insane pretension for me to write 'poems of a petrol bomber'. |
| 5 | I find it deeply embarrassing when, because art takes notice of something important, it's claimed that the art is important. It's not. We are talking about marginalia - the top tiny fraction of the whole edifice. When Auden said his poetry didn't save one Jew from the gas chamber, he'd said it all. |
| 6 | In the period just before the arrival of Margaret Thatcher, politics had been in such low esteem. Everything was so hedged, so mealy-mouthed. Then along came this woman who seemed to have no manners at all and who said exactly what she thought. She turned the political scene into a kind of Bateman cartoon, and everyone's eyes were popping and their jaws were dropping. I really enjoyed that, although I don't consider that period a good influence on my own world. |
| 7 | The first time I met Harold Pinter was when I was a student journalist in Bristol and he came down to see a student production of The Birthday Party. I realised he was sitting in front of me. I was tremendously intimidated and spent a good long time working out how to engage him in conversation. Finally, I tapped him on the shoulder and said, 'Are you Harold Pinter or do you just look like him?' He said, 'What?' So that was the end of that. |
| 8 | I think, like a lot of writers, I've got a cheap side and an expensive side. I mean rather like a musician might stop composing for a few days to do a jingle for 'Katomeat' because he thinks it's fun. |
| 9 | I find, looking back on my plays in general, that things tended to work out better if I didn't quite know where I was going with them. |
| 10 | Early on in my career, I had an interview with Mr Charles Wintour, the editor of the Evening Standard. At one point, Mr Wintour asked me if I were interested in politics. Thinking all journalists should be interested in politics, I told him I was. He then asked me who the current home secretary was. Of course, I had no idea who the current home secretary was, and, in any event, it was an unfair question. I'd only admitted to an interest in politics. I hadn't claimed I was obsessed with the subject. |
| 11 | If I had known in 1968 what we were going to squander, long before we had the excuse of 9/11, I might have joined in the fun with less embarrassment, with less to lose. But at the time all the goings-on seemed frivolous compared with the freedoms we had invented - or should I say the freedoms you invented? 'I was 31, I had been earning a living for 14 years, I was too old, too self-conscious, too monogamous, too frightened of drugs, too much in love with England and too hung up to let it all hang out. |
| 12 | [In 1968] It wasn't all posh, of course. The "scene", as we called it, was more populously located in a shifting underground of art events - exhibitions, gigs, happenings, poetry readings - in dark places around Covent Garden and elsewhere and here the word "revolution" takes on some substance, I think. It was not a social revolution, but there was a sense of a cultural revolution pivoted on that moment. Unfortunately, I was embarrassed by that, too. I loved the music and the dressing up but I couldn't take to the dialogue: a reductive argot of comrade-jargon and bogus wisdom derived from misunderstood eastern religions. |
| 13 | [In 1968] A few miles away across the Channel, clashes between protesters and riot police were affairs of burning cars, overturned buses and buildings turned to rubble. Our own street-fighting man was only rock 'n' roll. |
| 14 | [In 1968] I was asked to sign a protest against "censorship" after a newspaper declined to publish somebody's manifesto. "But that isn't censorship," I said. "That's editing. In Russia you go to prison for possessing a copy of Animal Farm. That's censorship." |
| 15 | I agree with everything you say, but I would attack to the death your right to say it. [parodying the saying of Voltaire: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to death your right to say it."] |
| 16 | Never believe in mirrors or newspapers. |
| 17 | Eternity's a terrible thought. I mean, where's it going to end? |
| 18 | Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering. |
| 19 | Every exit is an entry somewhere. |
| 20 | We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered. |
| 21 | It's not the voting that's democracy, it's the counting. |
| 22 | Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art. |
| 23 | The truth is always a compound of two half-truths, and you never reach it, because there is always something more to say. |
| 24 | The days of the digital watch are numbered. |
| 25 | It is better to be quotable than to be honest. |
| 26 | 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. |
| 27 | Life is a gamble at terrible odds. If it were a bet, you would not take it. |
| 28 | If an idea's worth having once, it's worth having twice. |
| 29 | Actors are the opposite of people. |
| 30 | Age is a very high price to pay for maturity. |
| 31 | The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means. |
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