Jez Butterworth

“I don't think that writers have any responsibility to be good neighbors to the audience.”

“I actually have blissfully romantic views of marriage, because that has been my experience of it.”

“I'm English and love England. Whenever I'm there, I'm always seeing the present but feeling its past.”

“I understood very little about the significance of the Tony before, but I've learned that it makes a huge significance to whether or not your show is going to run.”

“I do notice that I spend a lot of all my time steeped in different forms of myth, such as English folk music, for example, not really studying it necessarily, but just trying to experience it so I can recall it later.”

“Looking back, I spent a lot of time sitting in pubs when I should have been perfecting my playwriting.”

“I love Stewart Lee's 'Comedy Vehicle' on BBC2. The guy is a genius.”

“Writing for 'Rooster' was a strange experience. It's funny, once you tap into a voice, words just start to flow. You know when you've hit a spirit or captured something.”

“I grew up in a household that was very left wing.”

“My father got a trade union scholarship to Oxford; he lived and breathed politics; he was always watching current-affairs programmes. But I have a five-year-old child's attitude towards the news. Mainly, that it absolutely turns me off.”

“If you can write a character who is attractive but morally reprehensible, then you've got a character. It's got to feel like people I know and it doesn't just become a bag of tricks.”

“I may bring other women here, to this place, and I may tell them I love them, and make love to them. But they will be impostors. And I will be a ghost. Because it means I will have lost you. My body, my brain, my lungs, my stomach, my guts, legs, arms will be here but I won't be. I will be out there, looking for you. And if we meet somewhere, at a restaurant, or a party and I'm with someone, I want you to know that they are by my side only because you are not. And she will be beautiful. And I will be laughing and smiling and she will be laughing and smiling, but she will be laughing at a lie. Because all I will have done to that person is lie to them. All I will do to anyone else, forever, from this moment forward, anyone who isn't you, is lie. I have no choice.”

“When you have kids, you can choose to make them like you, or become like them, and if you've got something that's going to change every six days or six minutes, you can decide to be as awake and alive and learning as they are.”