Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Great comedy is always sadistic.
I don't love you anymore. Goodbye.
I love everything about you that hurts.
Everything is a version of something else.
When I couldn't write, I felt like a zombie.
I think writing is a glorious and noble thing.
Theatre is how I first encountered art on any level.
Enough people like me. Enough to let me sleep at night.
I don't want to lie. I can't tell the truth. So it's over.
I think you owe me something for deceiving me so exquisitely.
I'm a Jew. I think of myself as a Jew first and Englishman second.
A couple of flop plays, a death in the family, and it could all collapse.
It's one of the reasons I don't do drugs. One sniff and I'd go all the way.
I dispute that 'Closer' is about betrayal. Betrayal is one of the elements.
When I look back I can't believe I was so stupid as to direct Dealer's Choice.
I'm a happily married man and I think to get married you have to be optimistic.
Alice: I don’t love you anymore. Goodbye. Dan: Since when? Alice: Now. Just now.
I'm constantly having to be vigilant with a depressive tendency, an addictive tendency.
What's so great about the truth? Try lying for a change, it's the currency of the world.
But I'm the sort of person who, if certain structures topple, it could all go horribly wrong.
Lying is the most fun a girl can have without taking her clothes off. But it's better if you do.
I come back to the theatre happily knowing that while it won't make me rich, it will provide me with fun.
Oh, I would love to be in Don Juan's shoes for a weekend. Not that I was ever handsome enough to be a Don Juan.
My dialogue probably reveals the paranoia of the stand-up: if you're not quick and interesting, they will be gone.
I think a tragedy is something where the natural order of things is completely interrupted and doesn't right itself.
I don't try to be likeable. The worst thing people do is present versions of themselves to the world that aren't real.
If I get anything out, producing anything, no matter whether it's good or not, I allow myself a little pat on the back.
I consider myself a Jewish writer, like all my heroes: Tom Stoppard, David Mamet, Philip Roth, Arthur Miller, Woody Allen.
I think I write serious comedies. I would love to be able to write for pure pleasure, but the undertow is always loneliness.
When I'm on a train and see an empty pitch, it gives me a certain pleasure that I can't quite describe. It's to do with potential.
Alice: It's the only way to leave. "I don't love you anymore. Goodbye." Dan: Supposing you do still love them? Alice: You don't leave.
I have made a decision that in future, I will only take on movies that have a better than 75 per cent chance of being made, and that's not easy.
My life is in dialogue with the plays that I write. The relationship I have with my plays is very, very intimate, and I dot my life through them.
Where is this love? I can't see it, I can't touch it. I can't feel it. I can hear it. I can hear some words, but I can't do anything with your easy words
When you're in your early 20s your love life seems to explode every 20 minutes or so. By the time you've reached your thirties, it is every five or ten years.
I'm a Golden Globe nominee, yes. It's very nice. It's a very nice thing, but I kind of think of all the awards I wasn't ever nominated for, for years and things.
A part of me would like to see the money go to hospitals or housing, but I have benefited so greatly from funding for the National Theatre, which has been incredible.
I like the varying rhythm of being a writer that you have a period of being in complete isolation where it's just you and the book and your screenplay and no-one can read it.
Thank God life ends—we'd never survive it. From Big Bang to weary shag, the history of the world. Our flesh is ferocious...our bodies will kill us...our bones will outlive us.
I'd been to the Comedy Store, and I loved the terror of it and the way the best comedians could control the crowd. What confidence that would give you, if you could somehow survive.
I mean when the play was on in New York I was starting to get film offers coming through, and since the film's come out I get offered more than I used to, but it happens incrementally.
I used to go with my parents and loved it, I was in school plays, and I started reading plays before I started reading novels. I'll defend it to the hilt. When theatre is good it is fabulous.
Well, you just know, as a writer, I didn't really write one of the five best screenplays of the year. There were lots of brilliant screenplays; I was just one of the lucky ones who got nominated.
I hoped the dramatic power of the play would rest on that tension between elegant structure - the underlying plan is that you see the first and last meeting of every couple in the play - and inelegant emotion.
Always when I directed the play, I was always trying to cast people not who were necessarily like the characters, but people who I felt had the essential component that the character had, some kind of soul for it.
I like them all - I don't always approve. I see myself as a sort of benevolent uncle to these characters, and I can see why they do what they do; sometimes they make some mistakes, but at heart I think they're decent.
But I think the thing I'm proud of about the film is that there aren't many films - either independent films or mainstream Hollywood films - that are like this; it's of its own times, and it's the film Mike Nichols wanted to make.
I have the comedian's fear of bottles flying. I've never been bottled off, but I have had things thrown at me. Bag of crisps. And there's still a part of me, when I sit in an audience, that thinks people are going to start heckling the play.
That's the most stupid expression in the world. 'I fell in love'—as if you had no choice. There's a moment, there's always a moment; I can do this, I can give in to this or I can resist it. I don't know when your moment was but I bet there was one.
The trite answer is that everything is true but none of it happened. It is emotionally true, but the events, the plotting, the narrative, isn't true of my life, though I've experienced most of the emotions experienced by the characters in the play.