Michael Frayn

“It's the living that turn and chase the dead.”

“What is a joke? It's a little disruption of the order of things.”

“Because the thing about the past is that it's not the past. It's a story. And it's a story we tell ourselves over and over again.”

“Anyone can write. The real challenge is getting someone to pay you for it.”

“That's what it is to be a writer: to be the carrier of the news...The news of the inner world.”

“The great secret of farce is that you're not going to get hurt.”

“We all have a narrative, a story we tell ourselves, and we live our lives according to that story.”

“There comes a point in life when you have to face the fact that you are not going to be a professional footballer.”

“Uncertainty, in the Copenhagen interpretation, is not a regrettable insufficiency in our knowledge. It is a fundamental principle of the universe.”

“Drama is what you get when people are trapped.”

“That’s the extraordinary thing about consciousness; it’s the only thing in the universe that’s not in the universe.”

“Laughter is the sound of comprehension.”

“To be a novelist, you have to have a certain kind of patience. To be a playwright, you have to have a certain kind of impatience.”

“The past is the one thing we are not prisoners of. We can do with it what we will.”

“The function of the press is to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.”