Patrick Marber

“I have the comedian's fear of bottles flying. I've never been bottled off, but I have had things thrown at me. Bag of crisps. And there's still a part of me, when I sit in an audience, that thinks people are going to start heckling the play.”

“I'd been to the Comedy Store, and I loved the terror of it and the way the best comedians could control the crowd. What confidence that would give you, if you could somehow survive.”

“We pimp our precious lives to the infernal gnashing babble - Follow me! Friend me! Like me! But don't ever know me.”

“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.”

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

“I dispute that 'Closer' is about betrayal. Betrayal is one of the elements.”

“Oh, I would love to be in Don Juan's shoes for a weekend. Not that I was ever handsome enough to be a Don Juan.”

“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.”

“Larry: She doesn't want to be happy.Dan: Everybody wants to be happy.Larry: Depressives don't. They want to be unhappy to confirm they're depressed. If they were happy they couldn't be depressed anymore. They'd have to go out into the world and live. Which can be depressing.”

“I think I write serious comedies. I would love to be able to write for pure pleasure, but the undertow is always loneliness.”

“I don't try to be likeable. The worst thing people do is present versions of themselves to the world that aren't real.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Enough people like me. Enough to let me sleep at night.”

“Theatre is how I first encountered art on any level.”

“I come back to the theatre happily knowing that while it won't make me rich, it will provide me with fun.”

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

“I did have a midlife crisis.”

“I don't feel so alive if I'm not being creative.”

“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.”