HOWZAT

“When I left school, I wanted to be a great journalist. My first ambition was to be lying on the floor of an African airport while machinegun bullets zoomed over my typewriter. But I wasn’t much use as a reporter. I felt I didn’t have the right to ask people questions. I always thought they’d throw the teapot at me or call the police. For me, it was like knocking at the door, wearing your reporter’s peaked cap, and saying: ‘Hello, I’m from journalism. I’ve come to inspect you. Take off your clothes and lie down.’ ”

“Early on in my career, I had an interview with Mr Charles Wintour, the editor of the Evening Standard. At one point, Mr Wintour asked me if I were interested in politics. Thinking all journalists should be interested in politics, I told him I was. He then asked me who the current home secretary was. Of course, I had no idea who the current home secretary was, and, in any event, it was an unfair question. I’d only admitted to an interest in politics. I hadn’t claimed I was obsessed with the subject.”

On writing plays

“I want to demonstrate that I can make serious points by flinging a custard pie around the stage for a couple of hours. I write fiction because it’s a way of making statements I can disown and I write plays because dialogue is the most respectable way of contradicting myself.”

“I think, like a lot of writers, I’ve got a cheap side and an expensive side. I mean rather like a musician might stop composing for a few days to do a jingle for ‘Katomeat’ because he thinks it’s fun.”

“I find, looking back on my plays in general, that things tended to work out better if I didn’t quite know where I was going with them.”

On being asked what Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is about

“It’s about to make me very rich.”

On Harold Pinter

“The first time I met Harold Pinter was when I was a student journalist in Bristol and he came down to see a student production of The Birthday Party. I realised he was sitting in front of me. I was tremendously intimidated and spent a good long time working out how to engage him in conversation. Finally, I tapped him on the shoulder and said, ‘Are you Harold Pinter or do you just look like him?’ He said, ‘What?’ So that was the end of that.”

On Thatcherism

“In the period just before the arrival of Mrs Thatcher, politics had been in such low esteem. Everything was so hedged, so mealy-mouthed. Then along came this woman who seemed to have no manners at all and who said exactly what she thought. She turned the political scene into a kind of Bateman cartoon, and everyone’s eyes were popping and their jaws were dropping. I really enjoyed that, although I don’t consider that period a good influence on my own world.”

On political art

“I find it deeply embarrassing when, because art takes notice of something important, it’s claimed that the art is important. It’s not. We are talking about marginalia — the top tiny fraction of the whole edifice. When Auden said his poetry didn’t save one Jew from the gas chamber, he’d said it all.”

“I’m an English middle-class bourgeois, who prefers to read a book to almost anything else. It would be an insane pretension for me to write ‘poems of a petrol bomber’.”

On England

“I came here when I was eight. Within minutes, it seems to me, I had no sense of being in an alien land and my feelings for English landscape, English architecture, English character, all this, have just somehow become stronger and stronger.”

On modern art

“The term artist isn’t intelligible to me if it doesn’t entail making.”

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