Jez Butterworth Quotes & Sayings

Come, you drunken spirits. Come, you battalions. You fields of ghosts who walk these green plains still. Come, you giants! — Jez Butterworth

The world turns. And it turns. And it moves and you don't. You're still here. — Jez Butterworth

I love Stewart Lee's 'Comedy Vehicle' on BBC2. The guy is a genius. — Jez Butterworth

I'm heavy stone, me. You try and pick me up, I'll break your spine. — Jez Butterworth

I may bring other women here, to this place, and I may tell them I love them, and make love to them. But they will be impostors. And I will be a ghost. Because it means I will have lost you. My body, my brain, my lungs, my stomach, my guts, legs, arms will be here but I won't be. I will be out there, looking for you. And if we meet somewhere, at a restaurant, or a party and I'm with someone, I want you to know that they are by my side only because you are not. And she will be beautiful. And I will be laughing and smiling and she will be laughing and smiling, but she will be laughing at a lie. Because all I will have done to that person is lie to them. All I will do to anyone else, forever, from this moment forward, anyone who isn't you, is lie. I have no choice. — Jez Butterworth

Writing for 'Rooster' was a strange experience. It's funny, once you tap into a voice, words just start to flow. You know when you've hit a spirit or captured something. — Jez Butterworth

If you can write a character who is attractive but morally reprehensible, then you've got a character. It's got to feel like people I know and it doesn't just become a bag of tricks. — Jez Butterworth

A lifetime's work, to try and say one thing that's true. — Jez Butterworth

I do notice that I spend a lot of all my time steeped in different forms of myth, such as English folk music, for example, not really studying it necessarily, but just trying to experience it so I can recall it later. — Jez Butterworth

Happy St George's Day. Now kiss my beggar arse, you Puritans! — Jez Butterworth

I understood very little about the significance of the Tony before, but I've learned that it makes a huge significance to whether or not your show is going to run. — Jez Butterworth

I, Rooster John Byron, hereby place a curse
Upon the Kennet and Avon Council,
May they wander the land for ever,
Never sleep twice in the same bed,
Never drink water from the same well,
And never cross the same river twice in a year.
He who steps in my blood, may it stick to them
Like hot oil. May it scorch them for life,
And may the heat dry up their souls,
And may they be filled with the melancholy
Wine won't shift. And all their newborn babies
Be born mangled, with the same marks,
The same wounds of their fathers.
Any uniform which brushes a single leaf of this wood
Is cursed, and he who wears it this St George's Day,
May he not see the next. — Jez Butterworth

My father got a trade union scholarship to Oxford; he lived and breathed politics; he was always watching current-affairs programmes. But I have a five-year-old child's attitude towards the news. Mainly, that it absolutely turns me off. — Jez Butterworth

Looking back, I spent a lot of time sitting in pubs when I should have been perfecting my playwriting. — Jez Butterworth

I'm English and love England. Whenever I'm there, I'm always seeing the present but feeling its past. — Jez Butterworth

I don't think that writers have any responsibility to be good neighbors to the audience. — Jez Butterworth

I actually have blissfully romantic views of marriage, because that has been my experience of it. — Jez Butterworth

When you have kids, you can choose to make them like you, or become like them, and if you've got something that's going to change every six days or six minutes, you can decide to be as awake and alive and learning as they are. — Jez Butterworth

JOHNNY: Friends! Outcasts. Leeches. Undesirables. A blessing on you, and upon this beggars' banquet. This day we draw a line in the chalk, and push back against the bastard pitiless busybody council, and drive them from this place for ever. I, Rooster Byron, your merciless ruler, have decreed that today all my bounty is bestowed upon you, gratis. There will be free booze, bangers, draw, whizz and whatnot, for all the minions of my kingdom. — Jez Butterworth