Patrick Marber Quotes

Anna: Since my opening last year...I'm disgusting.
Larry: You're phenomenal. You're so clever.

Larry: She doesn't want to be happy.
Dan: Everybody wants to be happy.
Larry: Depressives don't. They want to be unhappy to confirm they're depressed. If they were happy they couldn't be depressed anymore. They'd have to go out into the world and live. Which can be depressing.

Alice: Is it because she's successful?
Dan: No. It's because... she doesn't need me.

Deception is brutal, I'm not pretending otherwise.

Alice: I don't love you anymore. Goodbye.
Dan: Since when?
Alice: Now. Just now.

I'm a happily married man and I think to get married you have to be optimistic.

I mean when the play was on in New York I was starting to get film offers coming through, and since the film's come out I get offered more than I used to, but it happens incrementally.

DAN
What do you want?
ALICE
To be loved.
DAN
That simple?
ALICE
It's a big want.

I don't want to lie. I can't tell the truth. So it's over.

When you're in your early 20s your love life seems to explode every 20 minutes or so. By the time you've reached your thirties, it is every five or ten years.

I love everything about you that hurts.

I think a tragedy is something where the natural order of things is completely interrupted and doesn't right itself.

I like them all - I don't always approve. I see myself as a sort of benevolent uncle to these characters, and I can see why they do what they do; sometimes they make some mistakes, but at heart I think they're decent.

Everything is a version of something else.

It doesn't really feel like it's got anything to do with me. I mean, I know I wrote it, and all that and invented the characters and made it up, but it's Mike's film, so doing the press and stuff, it feels a little bit inauthentic. I was just one component of it.

Dan: You've ruined my life.
Anna: You'll get over it.

A couple of flop plays, a death in the family, and it could all collapse.

I don't love you anymore. Goodbye.

I like the varying rhythm of being a writer that you have a period of being in complete isolation where it's just you and the book and your screenplay and no-one can read it.

Always when I directed the play, I was always trying to cast people not who were necessarily like the characters, but people who I felt had the essential component that the character had, some kind of soul for it.

But I think the thing I'm proud of about the film is that there aren't many films - either independent films or mainstream Hollywood films - that are like this; it's of its own times, and it's the film Mike Nichols wanted to make.

When I look back I can't believe I was so stupid as to direct Dealer's Choice.

Well, you just know, as a writer, I didn't really write one of the five best screenplays of the year. There were lots of brilliant screenplays; I was just one of the lucky ones who got nominated.

I know it's a film and all of that, and it's a Hollywood film, but it kind of feels like this sometimes, when you're in pain and it hurts, and you're desperate. Or you are about to cross some moral line and it's so seductive and you just do ... and all that.

We arrive with our ... 'baggage' and for a while they're brilliant, they're 'Baggage Handlers.' We say, 'Where's your baggage?' They deny all knowledge of it ... 'They're in love' ... they have none. Then ... just as you're relaxing ... a Great Big Juggernaut arrives ... with their baggage. It Got Held Up. One of the greatest myths men have about women is that we overpack.

Alice: Did you phone her, beg her to come back - when you went for lovely walks?
Dan: Yes.
Alice: You're a piece of shit.

Alice: It's the only way to leave. "I don't love you anymore. Goodbye."
Dan: Supposing you do still love them?
Alice: You don't leave.

Lying is the most fun a girl can have without taking her clothes off. But it's better if you do.

We pimp our precious lives to the infernal gnashing babble - Follow me! Friend me! Like me! But don't ever know me.

I'm a Golden Globe nominee, yes. It's very nice. It's a very nice thing, but I kind of think of all the awards I wasn't ever nominated for, for years and things.