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 way into something important happening in modern-day culture. — Mark Ravenhill Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share
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 Copy Share
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 Copy Share
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 Copy Share
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 Copy Share
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 Copy Share
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 Copy Share
In the business world, the idea of positive thinking is absolutely entrenched. — Mark Ravenhill Copy Share
Theatre within theatre, when characters sees themselves on stage, always raises philosophical questions of choice and free will. — Mark Ravenhill Copy Share
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 Copy Share
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 Copy Share
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 Copy Share
Candide is one of those books I read when I was young and that I come back to regularly. — Mark Ravenhill Copy Share
We are now so far advanced in our denial of evil that we want to rationalise it away. — Mark Ravenhill Copy Share
The financial crisis happened because no-one could actually say out loud how bad things were. — Mark Ravenhill Copy Share
