Candid Quotes by Mark Ravenhill

Rereading Candide, I was struck by the link between optimism and the optimal, the idea that we have been placed in this optimal world…

— Mark Ravenhill

Twenty years ago, when you bumped into someone and asked how they were, they would say, 'Mustn't grumble' or 'Getting by': now they feel…

— Mark Ravenhill

Optimism and happiness are not the same thing, but they are becoming interchangeable, and it seemed to me that Voltaire's Candide gave me a…

— Mark Ravenhill

The American journalist Barbara Ehrenreich has written about this in her book Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World (2009)…

— Mark Ravenhill

The title's so upfront. It gives fair warning about the play's content. I'm writing about a kind of disenchantment, an anger, but quite a…

— Mark Ravenhill

There is a remarkable nimbleness of style, a balancing act of tone, in Voltaire, which is hard to bring off on stage. When you…

— Mark Ravenhill

I have adapted the whole book [Candid] into tweets of 140 characters, and these are being sent out daily, at the rate of eight…

— Mark Ravenhill

In the business world, the idea of positive thinking is absolutely entrenched.

— Mark Ravenhill

Theatre within theatre, when characters sees themselves on stage, always raises philosophical questions of choice and free will.

— Mark Ravenhill

Even within single sentences, there are sudden changes of register. And when the travellers go to Venice, they see a play by Voltaire! This…

— Mark Ravenhill

Translating Candide into tweets has really deepened my appreciation of his writing - it wouldn't work so well with nineteenth-century authors. Every single sentence…

— Mark Ravenhill

There is the question of language. Although the play [Candid] is not written in strict verse form, there is an underlying beat of rhyming…

— Mark Ravenhill