Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
In our present state of degeneration it is through the skin that metaphysics must be made to re-enter our minds.
I thought I would try my hand at sailing. It was too small and kept sinking, so I decided to try a boat instead.
Playwriting is an oral art; it's not an art of a writer expecting to be read but a writer expecting to be heard.
Sometimes...it's better for a man just to walk away. But if you can't walk away? I guess that's when it's tough.
The American Dream is the largely unacknowledged screen in front of which all American writing plays itself out.
I fell into writing plays by accident. But the reason I write plays is that it's the only thing I'm any good at.
With my plays, when the lights go down, at least the audience isn't thinking, 'Oh, God, two more hours of this.'
Where in the wide history of the world do we find art created by the excessively wealthy, powerful, or educated?
Art and mass entertainment and propaganda, they can all be plotted on the same graph, but there is a difference.
I have noticed that the people who are late are often so much jollier than the people who have to wait for them.
Sincerity doesn't mean anything. A person can be sincere and be more destructive than a person who is insincere.
After all, when you take a walk you're after solitude, and if the solitude won't come to you, you must go to it.
Every message of despair is the statement of a situation from which everybody must freely try to find a way out.
We must stop being polite and behaved and find new inventive tactics to shift the paradigm. We are the majority.
If you treat life well, life is usually good to you. And I love life. There's a long-standing affair between us.
I've tried very hard and I've never found any resemblance between the people I know and the people in my novels.
I don't know if there are men on the moon, but if there are they must be using the earth as their lunatic asylum
I can think of no other edifice constructed by man as altruistic as a lighthouse. They were built only to serve.
Well, sir, you never can tell. That's a principle in life with me, sir, if you'll excuse my having such a thing.
I don't give a damn what other people think. It's entirely their own business. I'm not writing for other people.
The Companion of Honour I regarded as an award from the country for 50 years of work - which I thought was okay.
I'm a social writer in the sense that I want to record, but not in the sense of trying to change people's minds.
Of course, having information to use is one thing. Knowing what it means and how to use it is a different story.
I think that the human race does command its own destiny and that that destiny can eventually embrace the stars.
Plays are getting smaller and smaller, not because playwrights minds are shrinking but because of the economics.
Think of a musical as a string of pearls. If you don't have a string, you can't put the pearls around your neck.
The souls of all our brethren are ever hovering about us, craving for a caress, and only waiting for the signal.
Having to read footnotes resembles having to go downstairs to answer the door while in the midst of making love.
My body has certainly wandered a good deal, but I have an uneasy suspicion that my mind has not wandered enough.
Being alive and being a woman is all I got, but being colored is a metaphysical dilemma I haven't conquered yet.
I've still got my characters in my head, and I can still hear them. When I go to the grocery store, I hear them.
There can be no profit, if the outlay exceeds it. [Non enim potest quaestus consistere, si eum sumptus superat.]
Sitting down with younger women writers and saying, "This is what I do and you can do this" is hugely important.
For kindness begets kindness evermore, But he from whose mind fades the memory Of benefits, noble is he no more.
Those who say they give the public what it wants begin by underestimating public taste and end by debauching it.
I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river Is a strong brown god-sullen, untamed and intractable.
Openings come quickly, sometimes, like blue space in running clouds. A complete overcast, then a blaze of light.
I don't think a married couple can go through life without laughs together any more than they can without tears.
Man is not an end but a beginning. We are at the beginning of the second week. We are children of the eighth day
I'm not a poet. I wish I was a poet but I'm not. I'm a playwright. And so I have a different set of antecedents.
We're all just people, some of us accidentally connected by genetics, a random selection of cells. Nothing more.
A dictator must fool all the people all the time and there's only one way to do that, he must also fool himself.
It might be that to surrender to happiness was to accept defeat, but it was a defeat better than many victories.
Man has always sacrificed truth to his vanity, comfort and advantage. He lives not by truth but by make-believe.
Las Vegas, Nevada: A city where oddities don't make you lame, But instead bring you riches and fortune and fame.
Plays by Alan Ayckbourn have been attracting larger audiences in the regional theatres than those of Shakespeare.
Youth ages, immaturity is outgrown, ignorance can be educated, and drunkenness sobered, but stupid lasts forever.
The two greatest plays ever written were Hamlet and Oedipus Rex, and they're both about father-son relationships.
Many might go to heaven with half the labour they go to hell, if they would venture their industry the right way.
Blasphemy and prayer are one. Both assert the existence of a superior power. The first, however, with conviction.