Patrick Marber Quotations

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.

A couple of flop plays, a death in the family, and it could all collapse.

I'm a happily married man and I think to get married you have to be optimistic.

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.

Theatre is how I first encountered art on any level.

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.

It's one of the reasons I don't do drugs. One sniff and I'd go all the way.

When I look back I can't believe I was so stupid as to direct Dealer's Choice.

I know it's a film and all of that, and it's a Hollywood film, but it kind of feels like this sometimes, when you're in pain and it hurts, and you're desperate. Or you are about to cross some moral line and it's so seductive and you just do... and all that.

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.

It doesn't really feel like it's got anything to do with me. I mean, I know I wrote it, and all that and invented the characters and made it up, but it's Mike's film, so doing the press and stuff, it feels a little bit inauthentic. I was just one component of it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

But I'm the sort of person who, if certain structures topple, it could all go horribly wrong.

I'm constantly having to be vigilant with a depressive tendency, an addictive tendency.

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, I never know how much an actor puts of themselves in, and how much they're drawing on personal experience, and I wouldn't like to pry.

It just sort of slowly... you notice more people are calling but it doesn't feel like a big shock. It's very nice but it's not shocking.

I'd really like to write a play. I miss the theatre and I've got to get off my arse and write a play; that's really what I've got to do.

Everything is a version of something else.

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.

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

I love everything about you that hurts.

Lying is the most fun a girl can have without taking her clothes off. But it's better if you do.

I don't love you anymore. Goodbye.

Alice: I don’t love you anymore. Goodbye. Dan: Since when? Alice: Now. Just now.

I think you owe me something for deceiving me so exquisitely.

We arrive with our...'baggage' and for a while they're brilliant, they're 'Baggage Handlers.' We say, 'Where's your baggage?' They deny all knowledge of it...'They're in love'...they have none. Then...just as you're relaxing...a Great Big Juggernaut arrives...with their baggage. It Got Held Up. One of the greatest myths men have about women is that we overpack.

I don't want to lie. I can't tell the truth. So it's over.

What's so great about the truth? Try lying for a change, it's the currency of the world.

I think a tragedy is something where the natural order of things is completely interrupted and doesn't right itself.

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.

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.

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.