I don't think there's been any writer like Samuel Beckett. He's unique. He was a most charming man and I used to send him my plays.

There never is any such thing as one truth to be found in dramatic art. There are many. These truths challenge each other, recoil from each other, reflect each other, ignore each other, tease each other, are blind to each other. Sometimes you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost.

Occasionally it does hit me, the words on a page. And I still love doing that, as I have for the last 60 years.

I'll tell you what I really think about politicians. The other night I watched some politicians on television talking about Vietnam. I wanted very much to burst through the screen with a flame thrower and burn their eyes out and their balls off and then inquire from them how they would assess the action from a political point of view.

I never think of myself as wise. I think of myself as possessing a critical intelligence which I intend to allow to operate.

How can the unknown merit reverence? In other words how can you revere that of which you are ignorant? At the same time, it would be ridiculous to propose that what we know merits reverence. What we know merits any one of a number of things, but it stands to reason reverence isn't one of them. In other words, apart from the known and the unknown, what else is there?

Nothing is more sterile or lamentable than the man content to live within himself.