Explore Quotes by Martin Mcdonagh

All my work shares a kind of balance between black comedy and sad and despairing melancholy.

When I started out, I was very vociferously against theatre or what I saw theatre as being, so I tried to make my plays the opposite of that - something a bit more cinematic. I'm a film kid, so I'll never have the same love of theatre as I do of movies. It's just the way I was brought up.

There's no point in me meeting with a bunch of producers or studios, because I'll write my own scripts in my own time.

Everything went perfectly on 'In Bruges.' It was constant warfare, but I won all the battles and was really happy working with the actors and everything on the film.

I've always been very honest about what's good and bad in my writing. That honesty might have made me sound arrogant sometimes, when I was talking about work I thought was good.

I guess I've accepted that theatre is never going to be edgy in the way I want it to be. It's too expensive for a start. And, the audience seems to be complicit in the dullness.

When I heard the Pogues, I connected with the songs immediately, but it was also the first time I didn't reject out of hand the kind of music that my parents had always tried to push on to us when we were growing up.

I'm not really into the fame side of things, so I'm very happy with making a film every four years or so.

I can go anywhere. In fact, for 'Three Billboards,' I was just getting on trains around America. I wrote everywhere from New York to New Mexico. I always write with pencil and paper.

I hope there's some kind of morality in all my work.

My plays are always pushing towards cinema anyway. They're down and dirty, real and more fun.

I won't work on anyone's else's script. I won't write for anyone else. I write my own stuff and make that when the time is right.

I fell into the theatre because I felt I was doing it well, and I stuck to it for the same reason.

With a stage play, they can't cut a word; you can be in rehearsals every day, you cast it, you cast the director, too; the amount of control for a playwright is almost infinite, so you have that control over the finished product.

I never, ever drink while writing. Never have from the start, and I'm happy that I never have to. A lot of my stuff is plot-driven and mathematical, and I think you need a clean and sober mind to pin down the logistics of that.

I never lie in interviews.

I've learned not to be such a show-off and to have a bit more empathy with humanity. Or at least to fake that.

I try to naturally keep things to a manageable storytelling length, which is about two hours, so you try to cut out anything extraneous.

I'd love to do something like 'A Canterbury Tale,' because I love the English language.

My usual trick with the Irish plays is to set things on islands I've never been to.

When I'm happiest writing is just not knowing where it goes and just let the characters bring you there.