Patrick Marber Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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. — Patrick Marber

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

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

Thank God life ends - we'd never survive it. From Big Bang to weary shag, the history of the world. Our flesh is ferocious ... our bodies will kill us ... our bones will outlive us. — Patrick Marber

Everything is a version of something else. — Patrick Marber

She was...disarming. — Patrick Marber

It's one of the reasons I don't do drugs. One sniff and I'd go all the way. — Patrick Marber

I don't love you anymore. Goodbye. — Patrick Marber

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. — Patrick Marber

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. — Patrick Marber

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. — Patrick Marber

I am waiting for a man to come in here and fuck me sideways with a beautiful line like that — Patrick Marber

What's so great about the truth? Try lying for a change, it's the currency of the world. — Patrick Marber

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. — Patrick Marber

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

Deception is brutal, I'm not pretending otherwise. — Patrick Marber

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

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. — Patrick Marber

A million years ago - some hairy bastard daubed a horse on the wall of his cave, he saw it, he drew it - well done! Flash forward: 'Hello, welcome to my vlog. Today I bought a plum — Patrick Marber

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

I'm constantly having to be vigilant with a depressive tendency, an addictive tendency. — Patrick Marber

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. — Patrick Marber

Pleasure and self destruction ... The perfect poison. — Patrick Marber

Have you ever seen a human heart? It looks like a fist, wrapped in blood! Go fuck yourself! — Patrick Marber

I think you owe me something for deceiving me so exquisitely. — Patrick Marber

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. — Patrick Marber

I hoped the dramatic power of the play would rest on that tension between elegant structure - the underlying plan is that you see the first and last meeting of every couple in the play - and inelegant emotion. — Patrick Marber

I used to go with my parents and loved it, I was in school plays, and I started reading plays before I started reading novels. I'll defend it to the hilt. When theatre is good it is fabulous. — Patrick Marber

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. — Patrick Marber

Men want a girl who looks like a boy. They want to protect her but she must be a survivor. And she must come ... like a train ... but with ... elegance. — Patrick Marber

But I'm the sort of person who, if certain structures topple, it could all go horribly wrong. — Patrick Marber

Theatre is how I first encountered art on any level. — Patrick Marber

I love everything about you that hurts. — Patrick Marber

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

Where is this love? I can't see it, I can't touch it. I can't feel it. I can hear it. I can hear some words, but I can't do anything with your easy words — Patrick Marber

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. — Patrick Marber

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. — Patrick Marber

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. — Patrick Marber

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

That's the most stupid expression in the world. 'I fell in love' - as if you had no choice. There's a moment, there's always a moment; I can do this, I can give in to this or I can resist it. I don't know when your moment was but I bet there was one. — Patrick Marber

The trite answer is that everything is true but none of it happened. It is emotionally true, but the events, the plotting, the narrative, isn't true of my life, though I've experienced most of the emotions experienced by the characters in the play. — Patrick Marber

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

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

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

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. — Patrick Marber

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. — Patrick Marber