Even when the writing seems very frivolous, I'm puritanical. I don't mean my subject matter. It's that I'm almost pathologically incapable of leaving something when I'm not quite happy with it.
Life is a gamble, at terrible odds - if it was a bet you wouldn't take it.
For me, the reputation for teaching language in general, and East European languages most particularly, gave Glasgow University, and by reflection the country, a distinction.
Somebody who likes to do my plays is a good director for them.
Directors sometimes have good ideas that I wished I'd had, not on rewriting but simply on staging.
Responsibilities gravitate to the person who can shoulder them.
Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.
Maturity is a high price to pay for growing up.
I think age is a very high price to pay for maturity.
Honesty is seldom ingratiating and often discomfiting.
If I see an actor in a role that is really terrifying, no matter how many times I meet him socially, I'm still frightened of him. I think he's going to hit me.
I want to support the whole idea of the humanities and teaching the humanities as being something that - even if it can't be quantitatively measured as other subjects - it's as fundamental to all education.
I'm not one of those writers who insist they don't read reviews and don't care much about them. I do read them, and I do care about them, and they're not always what you want them to be in an ideal world.
My life feels, week to week, incomplete to the level of being pointless if I am not in preparation for the next play or, ideally, into it.
As a playwright, you can cover a lot of waterfront without being able to hold your own against an expert in any of those areas. I have no illusions about that.
Theatre is a series of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.
I don't draw on my inner life in my work.
'Arcadia' is obviously a play that's got interesting things in it that are perhaps quite hard to grasp.
James Joyce - an essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized.
As a child, I was airlifted out of the path of the Nazis. Unfortunately, I was parachuted into the path of the Japanese, but then I was airlifted again to India.