Quotes by Christopher Hampton

“To seduce a woman famous for strict morals, religious fervor and the happiness of her marriage: what could possibly be more prestigious?”

“If I had to give a definition of capitalism I would say: the process whereby American girls turn into American women.”

“I became a virtuoso of deceit. It wasnt pleasure I was after, it was knowledge. I consulted the strictest moralists to learn how to appear, philosophers to find out what to think and novelists to see what I could get away with. And, in the end, I distilled everything down to one wonderfully simple principle: win or die.”

“I think theres something degrading about having a husband for a rival. Its humiliating if you fail and commonplace if you succeed.”

“I always divide people into two groups. Those who live by what they know to be a lie, and those who live by what they believe, falsely, to be the truth.”

“I have always thought of sophistication as rather a feeble substitute for decadence.”

“You know very well that unless youre a scientist, its much more important for a theory to be shapely, than for it to be true.”

“Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post how it feels about dogs.”

“A great number of the disappointments and mishaps of the troubled world are the direct result of literature and the allied arts. It is our belief that no human being who devotes his life and energy to the manufacture of fantasies can be anything but fundamentally inadequate”

“The Royal Court more or less gave birth to me. I thought it only right that I should come back to have some Sunday lunch.”

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.

To seduce a woman famous for strict morals, religious fervor and the happiness of her marriage: what could possibly be more prestigious?