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

There is a sort of theory that you should adapt bad books because they always make more successful films.

To seduce a woman famous for strict morals, religious fervor and the happiness of her marriage: what could possibly be more prestigious?

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.

A great number of the disappointments and mishaps of the troubled world are the direct result of literature and the allied arts. It is our belief that no human being who devotes his life and energy to the manufacture of fantasies can be anything but fundamentally inadequate.

I find I have to give myself a day when I just shut myself off and do nothing but read.

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