“When I was a reporter in Bristol, which I was between the years 1954 a...” — Tom Stoppard Quote

When I was a reporter in Bristol, which I was between the years 1954 and 1960, the newspaper would get tickets for whoever showed up to play a gig at the big hall down the road, so I saw some wonderful people. The Everly Brothers, for example.

The thing about talking about human rights is that when one bears in mind the sharp end of it, one does not want to worry too much about semantics.

Somebody who likes to do my plays is a good director for them.

James Joyce - an essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized.

I'm not a theoretician about playwriting, but I have a strong sense that plays have to be pitched - the scene, the line, the word - at the exact point where the audience has just the right amount of information. It's like Occam's razor.

I saw a band called The Electric Guitars, from Bristol. I described them to Roland, and he just started playing a riff on guitar and said, 'Do they sound like this?' And they did.

Yes, I was a parish priest for five years. I was a curate in a large working class parish in Bristol and the Vicar of a village in Kent.

We never stayed anywhere for long. Southport, Blackpool, Bristol, Essex - we moved all the time. I went to dozens of schools. I was always the new boy.

'Skins' is about a group of teenagers in Bristol, and it's all about what they get up to and all the different things they do. I think it's a good show because it's come from a very real place, and there's a lot of young people involved in the writing.