Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I've got a fondness for rabbits.
I realize that I am never going to grow up.
I hope there's some kind of morality in all my work.
I can't stand up in front of people. It just fills me with horror.
It isn't about being or not being dead, it's about what you leave behind
'Pulp Fiction' is an amazing film, and I haven't made one nearly as good.
It doesn't feel like you're preaching, if you can say something in a joke.
If you've got time to waste, you might as well waste it listening to people.
My usual trick with the Irish plays is to set things on islands I've never been to.
I'd love to do something like 'A Canterbury Tale,' because I love the English language.
All my work shares a kind of balance between black comedy and sad and despairing melancholy.
I never feel like a smug or a smart-alec film director, and there are plenty of those around.
My plays are always pushing towards cinema anyway. They're down and dirty, real and more fun.
I fell into the theatre because I felt I was doing it well, and I stuck to it for the same reason.
I never really tell anyone what I'm writing beforehand because I usually don't know what it will be.
When I'm happiest writing is just not knowing where it goes and just let the characters bring you there.
I've learned not to be such a show-off and to have a bit more empathy with humanity. Or at least to fake that.
It's the periods and the commas that you have to forget about. The words never change, but the intonations change.
There's no point in me meeting with a bunch of producers or studios, because I'll write my own scripts in my own time.
I won't work on anyone's else's script. I won't write for anyone else. I write my own stuff and make that when the time is right.
I don't write all the time. But if I'm writing something, I'll just bang into it every day until it's finished. I write pretty quickly.
I loved 'The Master' a lot. I'm not going to get to work with Daniel Day-Lewis, but Joaquin Phoenix is one of the best around, I think.
I try to naturally keep things to a manageable storytelling length, which is about two hours, so you try to cut out anything extraneous.
I pick and choose what I want to do at any given time, and what not to do, importantly. My agents, I won't hear about any offers or options.
Plays were really my last option. The reason I didn't write plays initially was because I thought theatre was the worst of all the art forms.
When you've got good actors, they're going to come up with good stuff, but you're never quite sure how the dynamics are going to work between them.
'Beauty Queen' will always be a favourite because I think it's a really tight play, and when it's done right, there is a sadness to it that I love.
The fact that ticket prices are way too expensive, and there's only one bunch of people going to see Broadway shows, is something I've never liked.
I probably haven't had enough gay characters in my stuff. When you're writing something, you're thinking, 'Why couldn't this person be black, white, gay?'
I don't feel I have to defend myself for being English or for being Irish, because, in a way, I don't feel either. And, in another way, of course, I'm both.
An Irishman I am, begora! With a heart and a spirit on me not crushed be a hundred years of oppression. I'll be getting me shillelagh out next, wait'll you see.
I seldom feel comfortable in a theatre. I always feel like I own a cinema. I feel equally happy in an empty one as a full one. Probably happier in an empty one!
Everything went perfectly on 'In Bruges.' It was constant warfare, but I won all the battles and was really happy working with the actors and everything on the film.
Though it may not seem like it, I never try to write about a place, per se; it's always, first and last, about story. Story is everything. Story and a bit of attitude.
I guess I've accepted that theatre is never going to be edgy in the way I want it to be. It's too expensive for a start. And, the audience seems to be complicit in the dullness.
I've always been very honest about what's good and bad in my writing. That honesty might have made me sound arrogant sometimes, when I was talking about work I thought was good.
I can go anywhere. In fact, for 'Three Billboards,' I was just getting on trains around America. I wrote everywhere from New York to New Mexico. I always write with pencil and paper.
Dublin people think they are the center of the world and the center of Ireland. And they don't realize that people have to leave Ireland to get work, and they look down on people who do.
Theatre was an art form that I didn't really respect, and because I wanted to shake it up and do different things on stage, I was able to combine all the things I'd learnt through writing on my own.
Ireland was an idyllic place for us as children. We had all these cousins and all this green countryside. Given what I've written about rural Ireland, my memories of it are all blue skies and endless play.
I think if you're writing a play, it should be its own end game; you'll never get to do a good one unless you know it's not a blueprint for a film; you're not going to get the action right and the story right.
It's like two years straight out of your life doing a film. It's very enjoyable, especially working with the guys, but I kind of like the idea of traveling and growing, and developing as a writer and as a filmmaker.
When I heard the Pogues, I connected with the songs immediately, but it was also the first time I didn't reject out of hand the kind of music that my parents had always tried to push on to us when we were growing up.
I don't even subscribe to writer's block being a truthful thing. I've had writer's laziness quite often. But I think it's all about sitting down and facing down the blank page and doing it, and I've always been ok at that.
I'd just like to thank everybody who was involved in the film, especially Brendan Gleeson and Ruaidhrí Conroy. And Ruaidhrí, I'm sorry that you couldn't be here tonight but I hope next time, if they let you into the country.
As a kid, as a poor-ish, working-class kid, even visiting America seemed like an impossible dream. Every time I ever went anywhere in America, it always felt cinematic and dreamlike and like a movie from the '70s or something.
I never, ever drink while writing. Never have from the start, and I'm happy that I never have to. A lot of my stuff is plot-driven and mathematical, and I think you need a clean and sober mind to pin down the logistics of that.
With a stage play, they can't cut a word; you can be in rehearsals every day, you cast it, you cast the director, too; the amount of control for a playwright is almost infinite, so you have that control over the finished product.
I suppose I walk that line between comedy and cruelty because I think one illuminates the other. We're all cruel, aren't we? We are all extreme in one way or another at times and that's what drama, since the Greeks, has dealt with.
It's the way that I think about the world, and the way that I like to tell stories - I don't think you should get too heavy. There's enough out there, in the world, with violence. I think that comedy lightens the heaviness [of the world].