“I know that they want certain things and they’re in a certain room and they smell like this and they look like that.”

One of the tricks to writing great plays is to get people in a room together and not let them leave.

If it weren’t for the smell of death clinging to the walls, you might think it was your family’s turn to host the month neighborhood potluck supper.

I’ve never really felt that I’ve had the right hair cut, or had the right clothes.

I write till the end at least a draft of a play or a novel; but sometimes,

I’m pretty obsessive-compulsive and I’m very fast.

I began stealing a lot of ideas from other directors I had worked with.

I don’t know where the characters are going to go or what’s going to happen.

I find that more and more I’m trying to entertain myself when I’m working, because I know the work’s going to go to a horrible place.

It was like losing an important weight-bearing bone, and I knew I would spend the rest of my life trying to figure out how to walk the streets without it.

I don’t know if I have the ability to write an ending like My Fair Lady’s, when everyone gets what they want after a few minor conflicts.

The stakes are so high just for someone to make a simple exit.

And you can’t go anywhere in the sky unless you have a plane or some kind of rocket.

I’ve written some criticism, and I really enjoy it because I think it’s important for people to know that theatre is vital.

I suffer from and enjoy an incredibly vivid dream life. A lot of times there is a sort-of narrative and other times they are just funhouses of non-linear imagery and other scary stuff.

My characters say things to each other that I get accused of not being able to say to my girlfriend.

But when I’m writing I am just a big, irresponsible mess and I’m just impossible to get in touch with, and I don’t spend time with friends.

It’s true that I am not from the south and I have a certain reserve. I take time to get close to, and I don’t immediately throw my arms round someone. But it is more a question of style.

We have to stop this idea that we have to be a certain shape.

I feel nothing, apart from a certain difficulty in continuing to exist.

[Sherlock Holmes] has moved from being someone who was sociopathic, work-obsessed and slightly amoral, into being someone who has a certain degree of a private life, which is very, very private, with The Woman, or Irene Adler.

At a certain point I decided to keep on because I felt like the work was getting better, and I was taking great pleasure in that.

Love is next to Godliness with certain safeguards.

Happiness is above all things the calm, glad certainty of innocence.

The public business must be carried on with a certain motion, neither too quick nor too slow.