Theatrical Works Quotes

I am now in the full maturity of my age and vigor of my mind. Persons of various descriptions have repeatedly solicited me to turn my mind to dramatical composition. It was, indeed, the first amusement of my thoughts in my school-boy cell.

The musicals that I love on stage are generally meant for the stage.

All of my plays are deeply autobiographical. But it's not straight autobiography.

I think plays deserve other interpretations. They should live on, and other people should should take their hand at them. I'm very supportive of that.

I admire David Hare as much as I admire certainly any writer ever. What I like about his writing is it is very conscientiously, in one way, an attempt to reproduce the way people actually speak, but it's not just an attempt at naturalism. It's stylised and it's heightened, to great effect. It's elegant and it's funny and that's the way to my heart, frankly.

In the theatrical works we love and admire the most, the ending of the drama generally takes place offstage.

I have the vanity to think that every play I have written is different from the previous ones. Yet, even though they are written in a different way, they all deal with the same themes, the same preoccupations. 'Exit the King' is also 'The Bald Soprano.'

I keep starting supergroups, writing ballets and things like that.

Music and literature have always and continue to be massive influences. Writers such as Seamus Heaney and Frank McGuinness. I have always admired the humanitarians that I knew growing up in Derry whose influence steered me in the direction of some of the work that I have chosen in the past.

I couldn't write a happy movie or romantic comedy to save my life. Yes, Noel Coward's an idol, but his plays are serious to me. 'Private Lives' and 'Design for Living' both have an edge. Without psychoanalyzing myself, I think I exorcise my demons in my work.

'My Fair Lady' and Eliza Doolittle will go on long after me, and someone else will step into it for their moment. That's what's so beautiful about revivals: There have been so many interpretations, and we're just giving it what we can.

I wrote about 22 plays before 'When You Cure Me,' which was staged in 2005. I occasionally get them out and have a read, thinking maybe there's a thought or an idea or even a turn of phrase that I could use for something new. There's not. They're dire.

Plays, gentlemen, are to their authors what children are to women: they cost more pain than they give pleasure.

I have a musical called Goodbye and Good Luck, based on a Grace Paley short story. I also have King Island Christmas, and there are 20 different productions of it this year.

We now have no record of these famous stage plays, so it turned out to be very narrow-minded thinking.