“Art comes out of art; it begins with imitation, often in the form of parody, and it’s in the process of imitating the voice of others that one comes to learn the sound of one’s own.”

I write plays about things that I can’t resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.

But the headmaster happened to have been to Cambridge and decided to try and push some of us towards Oxford and Cambridge.

That’s a bit like asking a man crawling across the Sahara whether he would prefer Perrier or Malvern water.

Authors, she soon decided, were probably best met within the pages of their novels, and were as much creatures of the reader’s imagination as the characters in their books.

…she felt about reading what some writers felt about writing: that it was impossible not to do it and that at this late stage of her life she had been chosen to read as others were chosen to write.

To read is to withdraw.To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit inself were less…selfish.

Over the years Miss Shepherd was visited by a succession of social workers so the character in the play is a composite figure.

The Breed never dies. Sapper, Buchan, Dornford Yates, practitioners in that school of Snobbery withViolence that runs like a thread of good-class tweed through twentieth-century literature.

Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.

Books are not about passing the time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.

A composite too are the neighbours, Pauline and Rufus, though I have made Rufus a publisher in remembrance of my neighbour, the late Colin Haycraft, the proprietor of Duckworth’s.

To begin with, it’s true, she read with trepidation and some unease.

And if it can be explained that it can be explained away.’ ‘But this is History. Distance yourselves.

I think the writer’s quite low down in the hierarchy really. But the fact that they took the piss out of Nicholas [Hynter] who, besides being the director, is also director of the National Theatre is, I’d have thought, slightly more risky.

Artists, celebrated for their humanity, they turn out to be scarcely human at all.

I don’t talk very well. With writing, you’ve time to get it right. Also I’ve found the more I talk the less I write, and if I didn’t write no one would want me to talk anyway.

It is a tremendous act of violence to begin anything.

All the soarings of my mind begin in my blood.

I think for many songwriter/performers, you need to go off by yourself and write the songs to begin with.

Like the air we breathe or like the passage of time, is central to our existence as intelligent beings.

Except for a God who sits down after the universe begins, all other gods conflict with the assumptions of science.

I grew up in the church, with traditional hymns, but at the same time I was beginning to listen to pop music, the mid-60s.

Franz Kafka is an idea person. His books begin and end in ideas. Ideas have always been important to me in my writing.

Wembley way is beginning to blacked with people in terms of red and blue