What is friendship, if not a chance to indulge in mutual self-pity?

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.

It’s great to get out of the study and work with real living and breathing people.

If you take a really good book, then the potential is for a really good film. But you’ve got to get it right.

I love films. If I’d known how to get into or do it from the word go, I would have done that.

Often I think the novels I read won’t make very good movies – I better not say which I’m looking at for potential films! – but it’s nice to have an excuse to just sit and read for a whole day.

It’s possible to disagree with someone about the ethics of non-violence without wanting to kick his face in.

I’m ashamed to say the first play I saw at the Royal Court was mine.

I became a virtuoso of deceit. It wasn’t pleasure I was after, it was knowledge. I consulted the strictest moralists to learn how to appear, philosophers to find out what to think and novelists to see what I could get away with.

You know very well that unless you’re a scientist, it’s much more important for a theory to be shapely, than for it to be true.