If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting.
Passion, you see, can be destroyed by a doctor. It cannot be created.
Tragedy, for me, is not a conflict between right and wrong, but between two different kinds of right.
I was born in Liverpool in England, and I lived there for the first nine years of my life.
The rhetoric is the key to the character. It's the verbal music of the piece.
I was an accomplice in my own frustration.
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.
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.
Watching Italian opera, all those male sopranos screeching, stupid fat couples rolling their eyes about. That's not love, it's just rubbish.
A part of me is always envious of people who live in the present and are sustained by a sense of spontaneity. Even dogs have that capacity: they're always wanting to participate in something, and I don't often have that element in me.
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.
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.
I'd be willing to bet that any incursion throughout history in which the invading country has proclaimed it is bringing benefits to the conquered is based on a lie.
Librarians as a race tend to be tedious.
Everything we feel is made of Time. All the beauties of life are shaped by it.
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.
In London, 'Equus' caused a sensation because it displayed cruelty to horses; in New York, because it allegedly displayed cruelty to psychiatrists.
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?'
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.
Rehearsing a play is making the word flesh. Publishing a play is reversing the process.
