Dramatist

I do not long for the world as it was when I was a child. I do not long for the person I was in that world. I do not want to be the person I am now in that world then. None of the forms nostalgia can take fits. I found childhood boring. I was glad it was over.

I'm all in favour of free expression provided it's kept rigidly under control.

Full-blooded romantic love I wouldn't be able to write about.

If you think squash is a competitive activity, try flower arranging.

Your whole life is on the other side of the glass. And there is nobody watching.

I'd somehow always thought of the classics of literature as something apart from me, something to do with academic life and not something you enjoyed.

I'm less genial than people think, but I'm too timid to seem nasty.

Life is like a box of sardines and we are all looking for the key.

We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn't obey the rules.

I write plays about things that I can't resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.

We were all miners in our family. My father was a miner. My mother is a miner. These are miner's hands, but we were all artists, I suppose, really. But I was the first one who had the urge to express myself on paper rather than at the coalface.

Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.

I've been very lucky in everything, really - in my career and in finding someone to share my life with, and in not dying.

I don't want to see libraries close; I want to find local solutions that will make them sustainable.

We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.

Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.

I can't complain that I've had a public all through my writing life, but people don't quite know what I've written. People don't read you too closely. Perhaps, after I've died, they'll look at my stuff, and read it through, and find there's more in it. That may be wrong, but that's what I comfort myself with.

Life is generally something that happens elsewhere.

My films are about embarrassment.

I have no nickname, as there has never been any need for one.