Screenwriters

"Failure in any given subject is the first qualification towards becoming a teacher."

"On summer evenings, before bathtime, my dad used to pick me up by the ankles and swing me round and round! Then one arm and one leg! Like an aeroplane - Wheeeee! We trashed that bathroom."

"The writer doesn’t push story into us, he withholds information in order that we draw his story out of ourselves."

"Rita: Have they sacked y'? Frank: Not quite. Rita: Well, why y' – packing your books away. Frank: Australia. [After a pause] Some weeks ago – made rather a night of it. Rita: Did y' bugger the bursar? Frank: Metaphorically."

"Frank: There, you see, an example of assonance. Rita: Oh, it means getting' the rhyme wrong."

"Well, I flung the window open an' I shouted, "Yes, that's right Millandra – I'm goin' to Greece for the sex; sex for breakfast, sex for dinner, sex for tea, an’ sex for supper." Well, she just ignored me but this little cab driver leans out an' pipes up, "That sounds like a marvellous diet, love." "It is," I shouted back, "have y' never heard of it? It's called the 'F' Plan.""

"I'm not sayin' she's a bragger, but if you've been to Paradise, she's got a season ticket."

"Marriage is like the Middle East, isn't it? There's no solution."

"She divorced her husband, y' know. I never knew him, it was before I met Jane. Apparently she came back from work one mornin' an' found her husband in bed with the milkman. With the milkman, honest to God. Well, apparently, from that day forward Jane was a feminist. An' I've noticed, she never takes milk in her tea."

"Rita: Will they sack you. Frank: [lying flat on the floor] The sack? God no; that would involve making a decision. Pissed is all right. To get the sack, it'd have to be rape on a grand scale; and not just with students either. [Rita gets up and moves across to look at him] That would only amount to a slight misdemeanour. For dismissal it'd have to be nothing less than buggering the bursar."

"Good writers are monotonous, like good composers. They keep trying to perfect the one problem they were born to understand."

"Quando non si è sinceri bisogna fingere, a forza di fingere si finisce per credere; questo è il principio di ogni fede."

"We were good friends. The news of his recent death hit me hard. I still feel the pain of his loss. And of course I remember how I responded to his early writing. When I was very young Gli Indifferenti was of crucial importance as I formed my first views about writing. I’d have to say that for me Moravia’s earlier work was also his strongest. I love the work up to and including Roman Stories. I think he thought they were perhaps too popular, too much in the mode of a sort of national narrative. Whereas for me the stories in this collection are extraordinary. He managed in that book to depersonalize himself in a masterful way...by that I mean that he recreated himself in the form of many different characters in such a convincing way. His gift for getting inside the personality of characters so totally different from himself was truly remarkable. This was a gift comparable to that of Maupassant, a writer who managed to get inside many diverse characters at a time, so as to paint a complete fresco of the France of his period, of the life of the peasants, of the servants, of the city and of the provinces. He was a really great writer who is absolutely forgotten now. I would like somehow to bring him back. (PG: Is his work translated into Italian?) NG: Yes, but now it is totally ignored. There is a work of his which I particularly love, a novel called A Life, which I’m in the process of translating now."

"In principio, dunque, era la noia, volgarmente chiamata caos. Iddio, annoiandosi della noia, creò la terra, il cielo, l'acqua, gli animali, le piante, Adamo ed Èva; i quali ultimi, annoiandosi a loro volta in paradiso, mangiarono il frutto proibito. Iddio si annoiò di loro e li cacciò dall'Eden."

"Un male incerto provoca inquietudine, perché, in fondo, si spera fino all'ultimo che non sia vero; ma un male sicuro, invece, infonde per qualche tempo una squallida tranquillità."

"Gone with the Wind, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, they all should have had the hero cut down by a Dalek, and they would've been vastly improved really."

"Because it's the best idea ever invented in the history of the world!"

"We will sing to you, Doctor. The universe will sing you to your sleep. This song is ending. But the story never ends."

"Five million Cybermen, easy. One Doctor? Now you're scared."

"There's nothing better than a party that turns into a death trap."

"Each of his dramas is a progressive refinement of that sense of theater of which he spoke so frequently, a sense which insisted on the duality of the playwright as both writer and audience. The loss of touch with the audience which characterized the dramatic experimentation in the revolutionary stage events since 1956 was caused to a certain degree by the elitism of many of the changes. Rattigan never lost touch. To move an audience to laughter and to tears, rather than to confusion or puzzlement, was always his primary goal, and he consistently maintained sight of that goal. Of his contemporary dramatists, he alone survived the upheavals of the 1950s with his traditional approach which renewed itself in his stage comeback of 1970. And before the experimental waves subsided into the mainstream of theater history, Rattigan once more became a part of that stream. His comedies, history plays, and moving dramas about flawed or failed characters course their way unerringly down the moral and emotional mainstream of their troubled times."

"From French Without Tears (1936) to his last work for the stage, Rattigan was unashamedly a West End writer, an absorbed craftsman with a wit that reflected his own friendly, generous nature. It was a pity, no doubt, that he invented, as a symbolic playgoer, the well-to-do, middle-class "Aunt Edna" whose tastes, he said, deserved as much attention as those of the avant-garde. Her name slipped into a catchphrase. Rattigan's opponents, at an hour of theatrical rebellion, took every chance to belittle a probing storyteller."

"He must rank with Sir Noël Coward as one of the leaders of the twentieth-century stage in what has come to be known as the Theatre of Entertainment. It can be a misleading label; frequently Rattigan worked in depth. But it is true that, without venturing into what he regarded as unprofitable minority experiment, he wrote some of the most enduring narrative plays of his period, designed for a "commercial" theatre and using traditional techniques Pinero and Henry Arthur Jones would have recognized."

"The fact that he never felt able to write directly about his own homosexuality, taken by some to be a mark of dishonesty or cowardice, actually adds an extra level of hurt to his work."

"They are characterized by a refinement of mind and style that time is already beginning to prove are more than English public-school virtues and sleek techniques, as his strongest attackers claimed. Kenneth Tynan's labeling of him as the Formosa of the British theater and then Rattigan's subsequent creation of Aunt Edna, as well as his self-instituted debate in a "battle of the theatres," hounded him throughout most of his career. Yet, in what Hilary Spurling described as that "tricky but crucial (and so far almost wholly neglected) stretch of contemporary theatrical history when the stage became society's distorting mirror," Rattigan occupies a prominent place as the "oblique and delicate playwright of inarticulacy, repression, self-punishment, above all the damage people do to themselves.""

"I detect in his plays a deep personal, surely sexual, pain, which he manages at the same time to express and disguise. The craftsmanship of which we hear so much loose talk seems to me to arise from deep psychological necessity, a drive to organise the energy that arises out of his own pain... I think Rattigan is not at all the commercial middlebrow dramatist his image suggests but someone peculiarly haunting and oblique who certainly speaks to me with resonance of existential bleakness and irresoluble carnal solitude."

"The critics do talk a lot of rubbish about craftsmanship because it's something they don't understand at all... The fact is that Terence Rattigan's craftsmanship is like a carriage clock. They can see the insides and the workings of it, so it makes them feel more comfortable. They think: "Oh, yes, I see, that's what he's going to do next — very good!" — And so he gets ten out of ten all the time, quite rightly."

"Their great success is in articulating the anxieties of difference, of the will to fit in, to be ordinary; and of a corresponding desire to be extraordinary, to be different, to be individual. It is this tension that has enabled these works to transcend the trappings of their period, which had been much of their original attraction for my grandmother in the 1940s and 1950s, and to resonate emotionally for me today."

"It's the most amazing story and there is something extraordinarily real about the play. Why is the insight into the fear and terror so authentic? Because Rattigan lived it. The language of stiff upper lip and the understatement of wartime bravery is utterly authentic because it was what he knew and heard all around him in 1941."

"A critic has a duty to ignore anything happening off stage, and to make no allowances for any shortcomings that may result... All the same, I am at any rate partly human, and it would be absurd, as well as impossible, for me to persuade myself that I do not know that Terence Rattigan has for the last couple of years been staring into the eyes of the old gentleman with the scythe... So I am doubly delighted to say that Cause Célèbre (Her Majesty's) betrays no sign of failing powers; on the contrary it could almost herald a new direction for Sir Terence, and a most interesting one, too."

"French execrable: theatre-sense first class."

"[Terence Rattigan] had the greatest natural talent for the stage of any man this century."

"I suppose out of that brilliant playboy talent have come two important plays, The Browning Version and The Deep Blue Sea. The rest seem to me full of moral evasions. Perhaps any homosexual dramatist who, during a time of secrecy and blackmail, presented his own emotional life in his work as if he were a woman, suffered some terrible disability. Tennessee Williams was the most successful, but then he is woman right through. I think the problem with Rattigan was that even if he had had that opportunity for frankness, his whole repressed class background, the stiff upper lip of Harrow, would have made it impossible for him. Deception and restraint are at the very heart of that kind of Englishman. I suppose it's at the heart of me, heterosexual as I am."

"Consider Separate Tables. Here, most notably, in all the goings-on concerning an unhappy army officer, the many gifts bestowed on Rattigan by providence are on parade, his humour, his integrity—above all, his compassion. There is not one character who does not speak true. There is not one sentiment expressed which is not grounded in humanity, not one line that, in any way, diminishes the dignity of man. And, as for the compassion, that most Christian of all Christian virtues, it is there in such full measure that no member of the audience, unless his heart be made of stone, will go into the street at curtain-fall, without a lift in spirit and a fuller understanding of mankind as his companion. That is Rattigan's achievement and his triumph. That, so long as theatres exist and players strut their hour upon the stage and speak the dialogue he wrote for them, is his eternal monument."

"He appeared to be a complete model of the conforming upper-class Englishman just as his works appear to be perfect specimens of the well-made play, in reality he was not in the least conforming...there was a deeply Proustian ambivalence at the heart of him."

"It's a masterpiece of understatement but then we're rather good at understatement, aren't we?"

"He was a great playwright who understood better than most the inequality of passion and the fear of emotional expression that haunts our national psyche."

"It was often assumed that Rattigan was simply a purveyor of good middlebrow entertainment... Yet his whole world is a sustained assault on English middle-class values: fear of emotional commitment, terror in the face of passion, apprehension about sex. In fact, few dramatists of this century have written with more understanding of the human heart than Terence Rattigan."

"Undoubtedly, Rattigan can capture the surface of life; many critics would add that he is all surface, that his works lack profundity. I do not think this charge of superficiality can be made to stick. What is true is that Rattigan's scope is narrow, but where he touches he goes very deep. What he does delve into he will not abandon until he has explored the very depths, and what he finds there he brings to the audience with some reticence but unalloyed honesty. He can make golly funny and pathos poignant and what some would dismiss as "a purely theatrical experience" deeply moving and quite unforgettable."

"His best works will long be studied as models of playwriting and also as mirrors of the times. Rattigan can capture the social outlook of a whole period in Cause Célèbre (or the cause célèbre of The Winslow Boy). He can plumb the depths of obsessions rampant in a sedate residential hotel near Bournemouth, a crummy North London flat, a Public School, the active lives of Alexander the Great or T. E. Lawrence or Lord Nelson, the twisted lives of a financier with a charming but weak son or a rapacious woman out to snare her fifth and richest man who falls prey (willingly, self-destructively) to an ambiguous little ballet dancer. Variations on a Theme (whose plot is the last of those situations mentioned) is closely based on Dumas fils’ La Dame aux Camélias – but it is based on a steady and shrewd observation of English life in Rattigan's own time."

"Do you know what le vice Anglais – the English vice – really is? Not flagellation, not pederasty – whatever the French believe it to be. It's our refusal to admit to our emotions. We think they demean us, I suppose."

"A novelist may lose his readers for a few pages; a playwright never dares lose his audience for a minute."

"Let us invent a character, a nice respectable, middle-class, middle-aged, maiden lady, with time on her hands and the money to help her pass it. She enjoys pictures, books, music, and the theatre and though to none of these arts (or rather, for consistency's sake, to none of these three arts and the one craft) does she bring much knowledge or discernment, at least, as she is apt to tell her cronies, she "does know what she likes". Let us call her Aunt Edna."

"When you're between any kind of devil and the deep blue sea, the deep blue sea sometimes looks very inviting."

"Kenneth: If you’re so hot, you'd better tell me how to say she has ideas above her station. Brian: Oh, yes, I forgot. It's fairly easy, old boy. Elle a des idées au-dessus de sa gare."

"When another writer in another house is not free, no writer is free."

"In actuality, we don’t look for smiles in pictures of bliss, but rather, for the happiness in life itself. Painters know this, but this is precisely what they cannot depict. That’s why they substitute the joy of seeing for the joy of life."

"Suddenly, it seemed to me that the entire world was like a palace with countless rooms whose doors opened into one another. We were able to pass from one room to the next only by exercising our memories and imaginations, but most of us, in our laziness, rarely exercised these capacities, and forever remained in the same room."

"T feel like the Devil not because I’ve murdered two men, but because my portrait has been made in this fashion."

"There are moments in all our lives when we realize, even as we experience them, that we are living through events we will never forget, even long afterward."