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.

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

Fatherlessness didn't strike me as being an event. It was a state of life.

It is a defect of God's humor that he directs our hearts everywhere but to those who have a right to them.

Wars are fought for oil wells and coaling stations; for control of the Dardanelles or the Suez Canal; for colonial pickings to buy cheap in and conquered markets to sell dear in. War is capitalism with the gloves off.

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?

My life feels, week to week, incomplete to the level of being pointless if I am not in preparation for the next play or, ideally, into it.