I really believe that studying organization, even in the form of studying detective story organization, is very, very valuable for a playwright, a budding playwright.

But the first published thing I did was a detective story, detective novel, and I did that on my own.

It is very, very difficult for a playwright to write a scene in which a young man has his first deep experience of sex with a girl whom he found immensely attractive, is fully satisfied by this event and gets up and blinds a lot of horses.

The conquistadors and their followers were very rough people, and they were fixated on gold and silver. They were oblivious to the astonishing achievements of the Inca civilisation.

A part of me is always envious of people who live in the present and are sustained by a sense of spontaneity. Even dogs have that capacity: they're always wanting to participate in something, and I don't often have that element in me.

I made, over the years in Cambridge, several very good American friends, and America appeared to me, a land of promise in every sense of that word, a land of freedom from the inhibitions and restrictions that I felt in England.