Laura Wade Quotes

I think we love watching rich people behave badly. It has a sort of grisly fascination for us.

I don’t like writing with real people in mind.

I was the family alien. Both my parents are quite creative, but I was… appalling… always putting on little shows. I was rather a shy child, not a natural performer, but there was a performative edge to everything I did.

Whether you like the look or not, that tailcoat is a tough shell, a suit of armour. The posh boy is a hardy species.

I’m not very good at sticking at things if I can’t be successful at them. I gave up on sport a long time ago.

It’s very lucky to be able to do a job where I get to sit about writing plays all day and going to the theatre. The downside, I suppose, is that you put it out there, and people are invited to like it or loathe it.

I think it’s disingenuous to believe that being born into a privileged world means you feel like you are having an easy time.

And I admit it: there’s a rather dirty thrill when 700 people laugh at a joke you’ve written.

We’re not going to create a more equal society by not prodding at it, are we?

Old Etonians are the most charming people in the world. It’s not just the analytic ability and the great education; there is a really easy confidence to them that draws people to them and makes their passage though the world a little easier.

I really don’t know where my interest in death comes from. Maybe I’ve just got a twisted imagination. The truth is, I haven‘t had a hugely eventful life – maybe I’m compensating in my creative life. Or maybe I’m just a bit sick.

Maybe if I’d had more direct contact with death, I wouldn’t find it so fascinating and I wouldn’t write about it so much.

‘Posh’ is not really political. I didn’t want to aim a brickbat at the system. Or to bash Old Etonians. It was always the class and privilege aspect of that world that I was most drawn to. There is something endlessly fascinating about imagining something you could never be involved in.

I’m not posh at all. I grew up in Sheffield but never managed to pick up the accent – which was careless because there’d be some cache now in being a northern playwright, but I missed out on that one.

Apparently the show happens even if I’m not there. Who knew?

It’s an odd mix, the life of a playwright.

It’s not a meritocracy until everyone starts with the same opportunities, is it?

I’m always drawn to writing things that feel like uncharted territory.

I think theatre at its best looks into the dark corners; clearly, my dark corners are full of doom.

Writing a tribe is fun. They have their own language, their own slang; they repeat it, and it becomes part of the texture of the play. For a writer, that’s thrilling. That’s when my pen flies.

Your plays are always personal. You can’t help seeing yourself in the serial killer you’ve just written. But they get less specifically personal.

I think a lot of playwrights have a script in their bottom drawer that hopefully no one will ever see about a bunch of young people sharing a flat and getting up to crazy stuff.