I have adapted the whole book [Candid] into tweets of 140 characters, and these are being sent out daily, at the rate of eight tweets per day .

Optimism and happiness are not the same thing, but they are becoming interchangeable, and it seemed to me that Voltaire's Candide gave me a way into something important happening in modern-day culture.

We are now so far advanced in our denial of evil that we want to rationalise it away.

Voltaire's novel [Candid] offers us parallel universes, the possibility of entering into alternative worlds existing side by side, and this is something quite modern. Nested narratives and parallel universes are popular at the moment in many different art forms.

In the business world, the idea of positive thinking is absolutely entrenched.

The title's so upfront. It gives fair warning about the play's content. I'm writing about a kind of disenchantment, an anger, but quite a cool 90's anger, at a time when we're not very good at openly being angry. . . . I don't think I ever thought the title was titillating. I thought it was incredibly catchy. If the play is about the reduction in human relations down to a consumerist rationale, then thematically, the title is entirely linked into the thesis of the play.

Candide is one of those books I read when I was young and that I come back to regularly.