Quotes from Anthony McCarten

At 17, I wanted to be a rock star.

The people I'm drawn to are sort of self-created. They came from backgrounds where not much was expected of them, necessarily.

You can't write a character more brilliant than yourself. It's just not physically possible.

I was born to a very large family, one of 7 kids. I grew up with carnivals and chaos all around me, so I can write anywhere.

I have three favorite cities: London, Wellington, and Los Angeles. What makes them so good? The friends who live there.

I am so superstitious that I think even discussing this subject is dangerous and will probably bring me terrible luck. Having been raised a Catholic, superstition becomes almost part of your DNA. The challenge is to slowly rid yourself of these little delusions.

I'm still always surprised that anyone might be interested in my work or me.

Life is not a waste of time.

Be more ambitious. Do your homework. There's no easy way around this.

Commercial success and quality are not necessarily allied.

When I was growing up in the '80s and working in the theater, David Mamet exploded with a whole new reworking of what dialogue should sound like. It was punchy and raw and repetitive, bursting with dynamic. I remember that switching on a lot of lights for me.

One of the real ways out of conflict is humour. It builds bridges; it's a weapon against rigid ideology, narrow thinking, intolerance.

One of the great things about Churchill is that he had the guts to say the unpalatable, to level with the people, even if it cost him politically to tell them the truth.

Before Churchill had done anything else, he was a writer. He believed to the core that words matter. They count. They can change the world.

Truth is seldom appreciated and never understood, whereas a flattering lie is always appreciated and instantly understood.

The more I read about the rules the great orators used, the more I realised, of course, this is how you stir people's hearts, and you persuade and cajole and move people out of fixed positions. The techniques are quite menacingly easy.

If you look at the copies of Churchill's speeches that have survived, they are heavily marked up. He was scrupulous about the impact of each word. He preferred short words and the repetition of short words. He knew everything about the techniques of rhetoric.

Finally, it's not the lies we tell others that do the most damage, it's those we tell ourselves. From this all troubles rise.

We shall go on and we shall fight it out, here or elsewhere, and if this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.

Some relationships bust you up. Some make you.

Homo homini lupus est. Man is wolf to man.

And that's when he saw, at last, why it was so sweet to be infinitesimal: because as we become nothing, beneath the stars, so too do our troubles.

Sin is more than a stain that can be removed by a trip to the dry cleaner. It is a wound that needs to be treated, healed.

We've always supported corrupt regimes abroad if they help us with our global ambitions, so now we're supporting corrupt regimes within.