Quotes from Jez Butterworth

Writing for 'Rooster' was a strange experience. It's funny, once you tap into a voice, words just start to flow. You know when you've hit a spirit or captured something.

Come, you drunken spirits. Come, you battalions. You fields of ghosts who walk these green plains still. Come, you giants!

The world turns. And it turns. And it moves and you don't. You're still here.

I'm heavy stone, me. You try and pick me up, I'll break your spine.

JOHNNY: Friends! Outcasts. Leeches. Undesirables. A blessing on you, and upon this beggars' banquet. This day we draw a line in the chalk, and push back against the bastard pitiless busybody council, and drive them from this place for ever. I, Rooster Byron, your merciless ruler, have decreed that today all my bounty is bestowed upon you, gratis. There will be free booze, bangers, draw, whizz and whatnot, for all the minions of my kingdom.

I grew up in a household that was very left wing.

Looking back, I spent a lot of time sitting in pubs when I should have been perfecting my playwriting.

I'm English and love England. Whenever I'm there, I'm always seeing the present but feeling its past.

When you have kids, you can choose to make them like you, or become like them, and if you've got something that's going to change every six days or six minutes, you can decide to be as awake and alive and learning as they are.

I love Stewart Lee's 'Comedy Vehicle' on BBC2. The guy is a genius.

If you can write a character who is attractive but morally reprehensible, then you've got a character. It's got to feel like people I know and it doesn't just become a bag of tricks.

I understood very little about the significance of the Tony before, but I've learned that it makes a huge significance to whether or not your show is going to run.

I don't think that writers have any responsibility to be good neighbors to the audience.

My father got a trade union scholarship to Oxford; he lived and breathed politics; he was always watching current-affairs programmes. But I have a five-year-old child's attitude towards the news. Mainly, that it absolutely turns me off.

A lifetime's work, to try and say one thing that's true.

I do notice that I spend a lot of all my time steeped in different forms of myth, such as English folk music, for example, not really studying it necessarily, but just trying to experience it so I can recall it later.

I actually have blissfully romantic views of marriage, because that has been my experience of it.