Quotes from Martin McDonagh

When I heard the Pogues, I connected with the songs immediately, but it was also the first time I didn't reject out of hand the kind of music that my parents had always tried to push on to us when we were growing up.

I've always been very honest about what's good and bad in my writing. That honesty might have made me sound arrogant sometimes, when I was talking about work I thought was good.

Ireland was an idyllic place for us as children. We had all these cousins and all this green countryside. Given what I've written about rural Ireland, my memories of it are all blue skies and endless play.

I never lie in interviews.

I don't feel I have to defend myself for being English or for being Irish, because, in a way, I don't feel either. And, in another way, of course, I'm both.

I can go anywhere. In fact, for 'Three Billboards,' I was just getting on trains around America. I wrote everywhere from New York to New Mexico. I always write with pencil and paper.

It's like two years straight out of your life doing a film. It's very enjoyable, especially working with the guys, but I kind of like the idea of traveling and growing, and developing as a writer and as a filmmaker.

I never feel like a smug or a smart-alec film director, and there are plenty of those around.

I don't even subscribe to writer's block being a truthful thing. I've had writer's laziness quite often. But I think it's all about sitting down and facing down the blank page and doing it, and I've always been ok at that.

I never, ever drink while writing. Never have from the start, and I'm happy that I never have to. A lot of my stuff is plot-driven and mathematical, and I think you need a clean and sober mind to pin down the logistics of that.

There have to be moments when you glimpse something decent, something life-affirming even in the most twisted character. That's where the real art lies. See, I always suspect characters who are painted as lovely, decent human beings. I would always question where the darkness lies.

I can't stand up in front of people. It just fills me with horror.

When I'm happiest writing is just not knowing where it goes and just let the characters bring you there.

I try to naturally keep things to a manageable storytelling length, which is about two hours, so you try to cut out anything extraneous.

My usual trick with the Irish plays is to set things on islands I've never been to.

I hope there's some kind of morality in all my work.

I won't work on anyone's else's script. I won't write for anyone else. I write my own stuff and make that when the time is right.

All my work shares a kind of balance between black comedy and sad and despairing melancholy.

Plays were really my last option. The reason I didn't write plays initially was because I thought theatre was the worst of all the art forms.

Dublin people think they are the center of the world and the center of Ireland. And they don't realize that people have to leave Ireland to get work, and they look down on people who do.

There's no point in me meeting with a bunch of producers or studios, because I'll write my own scripts in my own time.

I think as a writer you never have to flee from fame because you're not that visible in the first place, but, after the Broadway success of 'Beauty Queen,' people were coming up to me all the time, and I wasn't really prepared for that level of attention.