A biography for David Farrhasn’t been written yet.
“It's a very bleak play, but there is some final sense of redemption. 'Coriolanus' shows mercy, a Christian virtue in an otherwise un-Christian world.”
“As you enter the world of myth, you have immediately a wonderful freedom.”
“We turned Cambridge theatre upside down, using odd spaces and devising everything collaboratively. It eventually blew apart, but I'm still proud of some of what we achieved. The style was very disciplined, and we had the sense to keep things short.”
“I think Le Carre is a great modernist writer, which is to say, in a godless world, he invokes deep, almost religious ideas of betrayal, trust, faith, and that's why we love it.”
“'Hamlet' is a play of many strange parts, with ghosts and players, politicians and clowns.”
“Theatre is a bastard form. I'm always proud of that. That's what makes it taste of life.”
“The 'Mahabharata' is a more complex and longer saga than the 'Ramayana,' which is like a fairy tale. It's much lighter and more fun, and at its heart, there's a cracking love story.”
“I think, for any writer, when you write, you just write.”
“There's nothing more frightening - and exciting - than getting lost in a forest. There is a journey towards the light, and you've got to go through the dark to get to the light. That's what the forest is all about.”
“To try to convey literally what the Garden of Eden was like is meaningless. What matters is its symbolic function.”
“I can only be instinctive in my reaction to Shakespeare.”
“The forest has always been a place, in fairy tales and in Shakespeare, where you go and discover who you are. You get stripped of everything you thought you were, some type of ordeal takes place, and you come out stronger.”
“The reason it's called 'The Heart of Robin Hood' is that he starts off not having a heart - or certainly not being in contact with it. And through a series of stories, he learns to discover that he has one. He becomes much more dramatic as a character, to be honest, because there's something rather too smug about the endless do-gooder.”
“The thriller protagonist is really just us in extremis. He or she is this individual who is placed under enormous pressure, has huge moral dilemmas and decisions to make.”
“I love telling stories. I don't really think in terms of clear 'aims.'”
“The 'Ramayana' explores the limits of secular freedom and the limits of religion.”
“Perhaps I'm temperamentally driven to see things from the point of view of the attacked rather than the attacker.”
“'Game of Thrones' is fundamentally based on a Machiavellian, almost Jacobean, idea of power and intrigue.”
“Sometimes we don't want to be lectured; we prefer to be taken on a journey.”