What was evident was that Mozart was simply transcribing music completely finished in his head. And finished as most music is never finished. Displace one note and there would be diminishment. Displace one phrase and structure would fall. I was staring through the cage of those meticulous ink strokes at Absolute Beauty.

I think plays, like books, are endemic. They grow out of the soil of the writer and the place he's writing about. I think, you just can't move them about, you know.

It is very, very difficult for a playwright to write a scene in which a young man has his first deep experience of sex with a girl whom he found immensely attractive, is fully satisfied by this event and gets up and blinds a lot of horses.

Can you think of anything worse one can do to anybody than take away their worship?

Goodness is nothing in the furnace of art.

All I ever wanted was to sing to God. He gave me that longing and then made me mute.

My actual childhood, as opposed to my adolescence, was not spent in London.