Quotes from Christopher Hampton

My problem is I'm a man of no convictions - at least, I think I am.

Often I think the novels I read won't make very good movies - I better not say which I'm looking at for potential films! - but it's nice to have an excuse to just sit and read for a whole day.

If you take a really good book, then the potential is for a really good film. But you've got to get it right.

I'm ashamed to say the first play I saw at the Royal Court was mine.

If I had to give a definition of capitalism I would say: the process whereby American girls turn into American women.

You know very well that unless you're a scientist, it's much more important for a theory to be shapely, than for it to be true.

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs.

I have always thought of sophistication as rather a feeble substitute for decadence.

I always divide people into two groups. Those who live by what they know to be a lie, and those who live by what they believe, falsely, to be the truth.

I find I have to give myself a day when I just shut myself off and do nothing but read.

You see, I always divide people into two groups. Those who live by what they know to be a lie, and those who live by what they believe, falsely, to be the truth.

I love films. If I'd known how to get into or do it from the word go, I would have done that.

A great number of the disappointments and mishaps of the troubled world are the direct result of literature and the allied arts. It is our belief that no human being who devotes his life and energy to the manufacture of fantasies can be anything but fundamentally inadequate.

I like L.A., but I think what's changed is that the kinds of films I do, the mid-range dramatic film, has become an endangered species.

To seduce a woman famous for strict morals, religious fervor and the happiness of her marriage: what could possibly be more prestigious?

Masturbation is the thinking man's television.

To seduce a woman famous for strict morals, religious fervor and the happiness of her marriage: what could possibly be more prestigious?

The only unbearable thing is that nothing is unbearable.

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.

What is friendship, if not a chance to indulge in mutual self-pity?

Men enjoy the happiness they feel. We can only enjoy the happiness we give.

Man seeks oblivion .

I'm a man of no convictions. At least, I think I am.

Since my adaptation of Ian McEwan's 'Atonement,' I get sent a lot of novels that people think will work as movies. So every now and then I make a point of sitting down and reading a couple of them.