[On his grandmother] She was blind and her legs went gangrenous, but she was the most important woman I've ever known, untutored and very strong. - Trevor Griffiths

[Estimating the proportion of the script for Reds that he wrote] I'd say 45 per cent. My first draft was 320 pages. The second involved co-writing with [Warren] Beatty. The third I had nothing to do with.

'Strategic penetrations' is a phrase I use a lot for the work of socialists and Marxists in bourgeois cultures ... I simply cannot understand socialist playwrights who do not devote most of their time to television. That they can write for the Royal Court and the National Theatre, and only that, seems to me a wilful self-delusion about the nature of theatre in a bourgeois culture now ... It's just thunderingly exciting to be able top talk to large numbers of people in the working class, and I can't understand why everybody doesn't want to do it.

[M]y folly was to believe movies were like plays; that you can fight for your vision. Forget it. A movie doesn't belong to you at all.