Characters on stage should be flat, like clothes in a fashion show: what you get should be no more than what you see. Psychological realism is repulsive, because it allows us to escape unpalatable reality by taking shelter in the “luxuriousness” of personality, losing ourselves in the depth of individual character. The writer's task is to block this manoeuvre, to chase us off to a point from which we can view the horror with a dispassionate eye.

Vice is basically the love of failure.

He lies like a book. And he reads a lot of books.

The first thing a proprietor learns, and painfully at that, is: Trust is fine, but control is better.

Love points the way. Desire is its ignorant advisor.

Trust is fine, but control is better.

As is said about most writers: on the one hand all I ever did from when I was a child was read, and I was a loner, which was furthered by my parents and my upbringing.