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"In the first play, the crisis is Thomas More. In the second it's Anne Boleyn. In the third book, and the third play, it's crisis every day, an overlapping series of only just negotiable horrors. It's climbing and climbing. Then a sudden abrupt fall - within days."
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More
"Life is a book. We are writing the stories of our lives."
Author Name
Personal Development
"The scenario where the sprawling anti-hero gets his comeuppance and the champion walks off into the sunset with his arm around the prize, usually a woman, is a pleasing one. This media personification of what a hero is all about used to be the common norm. Examining past events can confirm this convoluted outlook that sees the baddie being portrayed as some sort of evil manifestation sent to cause havoc by any means possible."
Author Name
Personal Development
"We are all born as storytellers. Our inner voice tells the first story we ever hear."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Many stories magnify a fact."
Author Name
Personal Development
"It's also possible to have two third person singular points of view, as represented by two characters through whose eyes the story is told in alternating chapters, say."
Author Name
Personal Development
"It's in The Lord of the Rings, I think, where one of the characters says that "way leads on to way"; that you could start at a path leading nowhere more fantastic than from your own front steps to the sidewalk, and from there you could go . . . well, anywhere at all. It's the same way with stories. One leads to the next, to the next, and to the next; maybe they go in the direction you wanted to go, but maybe they don't. Maybe in the end it's the voice that tells the stories more than the stories themselves that matters."
Author Name
Personal Development
"It was so quiet that morning in Paris that the heels of my two companions and myself were loud on the deserted pavements. It was a city of shuttered shops, and barred windows, and deserted avenues."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Life is a book."
Author Name
Personal Development
"The pattern of the narrative never of necessity wants to end, it never has to."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I believe every one of us possesses a fundamental right to tell our own story."
Author Name
Personal Development
More
"His suppressed grief becomes anger. But what can he do with anger? It must also be suppressed."
Emotion
"There's a feeling of power in reserve, a power that drives right through the bone, like the shiver you sense in the shaft of an axe when you take it into your hand. You can strike, or you can not strike, and if you choose to hold back the blow, you can still feel inside you the resonance of the omitted thing."
Power
"You can be merry with the king, you can share a joke with him. But as Thomas More used to say, it's like sporting with a tamed lion. You tousle its mane and pull its ears, but all the time you're thinking, those claws, those claws, those claws."
Humor
"Feminism hasn't failed, it's just never been tried."
Feminism
"In order not to make a liar out of Henry or Katherine, one or the other, the committee men think up circumstances in which the match may have been partly consummated, or somewhat consummated, and to do this they have to imagine every disaster and shame that can occur between a man and a woman alone in a room in the dark."
Marriage
"The trouble with England, he thinks, is that it's so poor in gesture. We shall have to develop a hand signal for 'Back off, our prince is fucking this man's daughter.' He is surprised that the Italians have not done it. Though perhaps they have, and he just never caught on."
Culture
"He saw that it was the gaps that were important, the spaces between the threads which made the pattern, and not the threads themselves."
Observation
"As Danton sees it, the most bizarre aspect of Camille's character is his desire to scribble over every blank surface; he sees a guileless piece of paper, virgin and harmless, and persecutes it till it is black with words, and then besmirches its sister, and so on, through the quire."
Creativity
"He is not a man wedded to action, Boleyn, but rather a man who stands by, smirking and stroking his beard; he thinks he looks enigmatic, but instead he looks as if he's pleasuring himself."
Observation
"Every time you go to see Hamlet you don't expect it to have a happy ending...you're still enthralled. (Interview BBC Radio 4 Today 17 October 2012.)"
Tragedy
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