He's never known anything like it! But then, he has never known anything to write home about, so this is nothing to write home about.

The tragedy of journalism is that these are people doing their best work.

Left to themselves people are noble, generous, uncorrupted, they'd create a completely new kind of society if only people weren't so blind, stupid and selfish.

When you stir your rice pudding, Septimus, the spoonful of jam spreads itself round making red trails like the picture of a meteor in my astronomical atlas. But if you stir backwards, the jam will not come together again. Indeed, the pudding does not notice and continues to turn pink just as before. Do you think this is odd?

Writing a play is like smashing that [glass] ashtray, filming it in slow motion, and then running the film in reverse, so that the fragments of rubble appear to fly together. You start - or at least I start - with the rubble.

Back in the East you can't do much without the right papers, but with the right papers you can do anything The believe in papers. Papers are power.

You can't but know that if you can capture the emotions of the audience as well as their minds, the play will work better, because it's a narrative art form.