Love Quote by Patrick Marber

Affection with an asterisk is Marber's whole operating system. The line reads like a friendly shrug, but it sketches a precise ethics of character-making: not the godlike author dispensing verdicts, not the therapist excusing everything, but the "benevolent uncle" - close enough to know the family secrets, distant enough to keep his own hands clean.

"I like them all" is the disarming bit, an insistence on curiosity over condemnation. Then comes the corrective: "I don't always approve". That's where the drama lives. Approval is what audiences often demand - moral sorting, heroes to root for, villains to boo. Marber refuses the comfort of that binary. He understands his people without granting them sainthood, which is why his work (especially in a play like Closer) lands with such bruising intimacy: characters cheat, lie, and posture, and the text doesn't rush in to absolve them or punish them. It just watches them keep choosing.

The uncle metaphor is doing quiet labor. Uncles are unofficial guardians; they can scold without disowning. That stance gives Marber permission to write characters who are messy in ways that feel recognizably modern - self-justifying, performatively honest, terrible at love - while still insisting on their basic humanity. "At heart... decent" isn't a Hallmark ending; it's a bleakly hopeful baseline. People can be decent and still do damage. Marber's intent is to make us sit in that discomfort, where empathy doesn't equal endorsement and understanding doesn't erase consequences.