In 1968 the Arts Council managed to get a grant from the treasury to buy up a lot of derelict touring theatres and put them back in the hands of the local authorities.

The classical writers... playwrights, Jacobean, Elizabethan playwrights, all showed areas of all classes and how they live and painted them pretty authentically.

The newly decorated theatres produced things like car parks and restaurants, so you could have a good night out, quite cheaply without all that bother of having to go somewhere else.

The foyers now look ridiculously small to us because not all that many people used them.

Anybody can decide if they have got the money to fight a case if they don't like a particular thing, and they complain to the watch committee, local council or whatever.

You're not allowed to step out of whatever the rules are, politically, or socially, and they'll get you for it, they'll hunt you down. That's the really frightening thing.

I don't believe in right-angled turning points.

I'm reluctant to use the word class so much.

No producer should revive a play unless they have a very good reason for it. I think there's quite enough about a good play to make it available to new audiences.

A conventional playwright tries to tell you more about the characters than they know about themselves.

The Long and the Short and the Tall made a great impression on me because it was a very ugly tale about the reality of soldiering at a time when we were being gung-ho about the whole thing of war.

A Christmas gambol oft could cheerThe poor man's heart through half the year.

In America, we collect more digital communications from America than we do from the Russians.

The strength of a theory is not what it allows, but what it prohibits; if you can invent an equally persuasive explanation for any outcome, you have zero knowledge.

I was unnerved to learn in my twenties that the poems of Emily Dickinson that I had memorized as a girl were not the poems as she had written them.

We want to make people feel something after they buy that ticket.

I still think I'm writing Nancy Drew with a mortgage.

I think I've learned that if you have a house, you end up living in the kitchen, so if you have one big kitchen and then enough bedrooms for your family, that's about all you need for a home.

Hillary Clinton respects good ideas wherever they come from. That's something I haven't seen in a lot of powerful people.

I have two lovely sons and some good memories, but I've had a rather tumultuous personal life. It hasn't been dull; I've been the Hiroshima of love.