I never think of myself as wise. I think of myself as possessing a critical intelligence which I intend to allow to operate.

I don't intend to simply go away and write my plays and be a good boy. I intend to remain an independent and political intelligence in my own right.

I mean, don't forget the earth's about five thousand million years old, at least. Who can afford to live in the past?

The past is what you remember, imagine you remember, convince yourself you remember, or pretend you remember.

I want to start my own airplane business. I'm going to buy two Dakotas, paint them up in war colours and do, er, nostalgia trips to Arnhem - you know, where the old paratroopers used to go - and charge them about 20 quid a time.

Terrorism gravely threatens international peace and security, and as a solution, the power and apparent finality of force are seductive.

The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.

I was very much a child of the Cold War.