Patrick Marber quotes:

Alice: It's the only way to leave. "I don't love you anymore. Goodbye." Dan: Supposing you do still love them? Alice: You don't leave.

Well, you just know, as a writer, I didn't really write one of the five best screenplays of the year. There were lots of brilliant screenplays; I was just one of the lucky ones who got nominated.

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

I used to go with my parents and loved it, I was in school plays, and I started reading plays before I started reading novels. I'll defend it to the hilt. When theatre is good it is fabulous.

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

Dan: You've ruined my life.Anna: You'll get over it.

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

I don't love you anymore. Goodbye.

Alice: I don't love you anymore. Goodbye. Dan: Since when? Alice: Now. Just now.

I hoped the dramatic power of the play would rest on that tension between elegant structure - the underlying plan is that you see the first and last meeting of every couple in the play - and inelegant emotion.

I'm a happily married man and I think to get married you have to be optimistic.

The trite answer is that everything is true but none of it happened. It is emotionally true, but the events, the plotting, the narrative, isn't true of my life, though I've experienced most of the emotions experienced by the characters in the play.

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.

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.

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.

Theatre is how I first encountered art on any level.

But I'm the sort of person who, if certain structures topple, it could all go horribly wrong.

I don't want to lie. I can't tell the truth. So it's over.

I think a tragedy is something where the natural order of things is completely interrupted and doesn't right itself.

Lying is the most fun a girl can have without taking her clothes off. But it's better if you do.

I know it's a film and all of that, and it's a Hollywood film, but it kind of feels like this sometimes, when you're in pain and it hurts, and you're desperate. Or you are about to cross some moral line and it's so seductive and you just do... and all that.

We arrive with our...'baggage' and for a while they're brilliant, they're 'Baggage Handlers.' We say, 'Where's your baggage?' They deny all knowledge of it...'They're in love'...they have none. Then...just as you're relaxing...a Great Big Juggernaut arrives...with their baggage. It Got Held Up. One of the greatest myths men have about women is that we overpack.

It's one of the reasons I don't do drugs. One sniff and I'd go all the way.

I'm constantly having to be vigilant with a depressive tendency, an addictive tendency.

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.

Everything is a version of something else.

I like the varying rhythm of being a writer that you have a period of being in complete isolation where it's just you and the book and your screenplay and no-one can read it.

I love everything about you that hurts.

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 think you owe me something for deceiving me so exquisitely.

Thank God life endsâ??we'd never survive it. From Big Bang to weary shag, the history of the world. Our flesh is ferocious...our bodies will kill us...our bones will outlive us.

What's so great about the truth? Try lying for a change, it's the currency of the world.

Where is this love? I can't see it, I can't touch it. I can't feel it. I can hear it. I can hear some words, but I can't do anything with your easy words