"They were burning the stubbled fields and a great stain of smoke flooded the horizon. Nothing amiss here, nothing derelict, the roofs newly thatched, the hedges trimmed, the gardens bright with flowers."

"Everything else you grow out of, but you never recover from childhood."

"She opens her case with an account of her own experience — she married three times and twice it was rotten — and goes on to list, throughout the ages, the devastation perpetuated in the name of love. ... I disagree with some of her book. She chronicles a horrific list of cruelties and repressions practiced in the name of love and she infers that it is the exception rather than the rule that people know how to love one another. She must be wrong. What about all those millions of human beings who, long before the welfare state, despite misery, hunger and disease, mostly managed to care for each other with charity and tenderness? I don't know why any of us should presume that we're here to do anything very special, except procreate ..."

"Being constantly with the children was like wearing a pair of shoes that were expensive and too small. She couldn't bear to throw them out, but they gave her blisters."

"I am of the firm belief that everybody could write books and I never understand why they don't. After all, everyone speaks. Once the grammar has been learnt it is simply talking on paper and in time learning what not to say."

"No one ever wanted to see it as anything other than a boring play about a middle-aged man having a mid-life crisis. I think it’s about rather more than that - or maybe it’s not. Maybe that’s exactly what it is about."

"Back in my 20s, I was playing poker to avoid living. I wasn’t very satisfied with life. I used to play in a big game in Archway. And we’d play as much as we possibly could and for as much money as we had, and that went on for a couple of years."

"I was thinking in the cab on the way here that when I did press for the original production it felt like this was what I’ve always dreamt of — to be talking about myself, and about a play that I’ve written, and to be photographed. It was what I wanted. Now it’s just part of the job."

"We've all seen 'Jewing it up' performances. They are about as miserable to watch as as 'camping it up' performances when representing gays."

"I carry Keaton's photo around with me to remind me what happened to him. If the Hollywood system can destroy him it can destroy me."

"I feel about Keaton the way an organist thinks of Bach."

"Hookers have to deliver on their promise... unlike politicians."

"I was about five and a half or six when I converted [to vegetarianism] … I was brought up the first five years of my life in London, in the working-class part of the city, where the only animals that a child is liable to see are domestic animals, or cats, or pigeons, or horses, none of which one eats. Then I was evacuated onto a farm when the war came, and billeted with this family of farmers, and I got very friendly with a rabbit—George, the rabbit. Then one day, George the rabbit was George the lunch. For a farming family there was nothing obscene about that. They kill animals; they serve them up at table and say, "Hey, yes, that's the animal you were playing with yesterday!"—which is not abnormal. It was obscene to me as a child."

"Comedy, like sodomy, is an unnatural act."

"Sex is two plus two making five, rather than four. Sex is the X ingredient that you can't define, and it's that X ingredient between two people that make both a man and a woman good in bed. It's all relative. There are no rules."

"Money can't buy poverty."

"I won't eat anything that has intelligent life, but I'd gladly eat a network executive or a politician."

"When I quoted Bulwer Lytton's "The pen is mightier than the sword" to Marty Feldman he added reflectively, "Yes, and considerably easier to write with.""

"This is a letter of hate. It is for you my countrymen, I mean those men of my country who have defiled it. The men with manic fingers leading the sightless, feeble, betrayed body of my country to its death."

"Brecht always liked people to be aware that they were in a theatre. I said to him more than once, but Brecht, what makes you think they think they're anywhere else?"

"Masturbation is the thinking man's television."

"I always divide people into two groups. Those who live by what they know to be a lie, and those who live by what they believe, falsely, to be the truth."

"Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs."

"John Osborne spoke out in a vein of ebullient, free-wheeling rancour that betokened the arrival of something new in the theatre – a sophisticated, articulate lower-class. Most of the critics were offended by Jimmy Porter, but not on account of his anger; a working-class hero is expected to be angry. What nettled them was something quite different: his self-confidence. This was no envious inferior whose insecurity they could pity."

"Archie Rice: Let me know where you're working tomorrow night and I'll come and see you."

"Jimmy Porter: They spend their time mostly looking forward to the past."

"Archie Rice: I'm dead behind these eyes. I'm dead, just like the whole inert, shoddy lot out there. It doesn't matter because I don't feel a thing, and neither do they."

"Archie Rice: Don't clap too hard – it's a very old building."

"Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost what it feels about dogs."

"George Dillon: [I]t's easy to answer the ultimate questions – it saves you bothering with the immediate ones."

"If you go to Tokyo, I think it becomes very obvious that there's this almost seamless mixture of popular culture and Japanese traditional culture."

"[Kazuo Ishiguro], in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world."

"There is a new novel coming out by a British man-Kazuo Ishiguro. He is so good. He's about 35 years old; this is his third book. The command of language-his language is so superior. The moment that you start reading his book you enter the land of story, because of the way the words are put together. God, that man is so good!"

"I keep thinking about this river somewhere, with the water moving really fast. And these two people in the water, trying to hold onto each other, holding on as hard as they can, but in the end it's just too much. The current's too strong. They've got to let go, drift apart. That's how it is with us. It's a shame, Kath, because we've loved each other all our lives. But in the end, we can't stay together forever."

"Memories, even your most precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly. But I don't go along with that. The memories I value most, I don't see them ever fading."

"This is all strictly against regulations, of course, and Marie-Claude should never have asked you in. And naturally, I should have turned you out the second I knew you were here. But Marie-Claude doesn't care much for their regulations these days, and I must say, neither do I."

"Well, this is a surprise. If you aren't here to give me trouble, then why are you here?"

"It was like when you make a move in chess and just as you take your finger off the piece, you see the mistake you've made, and there's this panic because you don't know yet the scale of disaster you've left yourself open to."

"Miss Emily had an intellect you could slice logs with."

"Her general drift was clear enough: we were all very special, being Hailsham students, and so it was all the more disappointing when we behaved badly."

"The Sales were important to us because that was how we got hold of things from outside."

"I won't be a carer any more come the end of the year, and though I've got a lot out of it, I have to admit I'll welcome the chance to rest."

"It never occurred to us to wonder how we would feel being seen like that."

"Maybe she sells them. Outside, out there."

"What is this gallery? Why should she have a gallery of things done by us?"

"She said we weren't being taught enough."

"Kath, I've been looking all over for you. I mean't to say sorry. I mean, I'm really, really sorry. I honestly didn't mean to hit you the other day. I wouldn't dream of hitting a girl, and even if I did, I'd never want to hit you. I'm really, really sorry."

"'At least you got him to pipe down,' she said. 'Are you okay? Mad animal.'"

"It'll come off. If you can't get it off yourself, just take it to Miss Jody."

"Ruth, incidentally, was only the third or fourth donor I got to choose."