Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
In listening to the narratives of the Congolese, I came to terms with the extent to which their bodies had become battlefields.
At the heart of the failure of most plays is the inability to carry on a thoughtful conversation about your work with yourself.
The Theatre of the Absurd is a theatrical embodiment and manifestation of existentialism. It is part reality and part nightmare
In any event, a truth that disheartens, because it is true, is still of far more value than the most stimulating of falsehoods.
It's precisely the disappointing stories, which have no proper ending and therefore no proper meaning, that sound true to life.
If everyone were clothed with integrity, if every heart were just, frank, kindly, the other virtues would be well-nigh useless.
There's nothing quite like tobacco: it's the passion of decent folk, and whoever lives without tobacco doesn't deserve to live.
Labour leaders lead us all, though we know they bleed us all. Cheer our new Decline and Fall, Gibbon might have dreamed it all.
I love truth and wish to have it always spoken to me: I hate a liar. [Lat., Ego verum amo, verum volo mihi dici; mendacem odi.]
There's no possibility of being witty without a little ill-nature - the malice of a good thing is the barb that makes it stick.
I think I'm a writer, and it's my job. People in other professions are expected to do their jobs all the time. Why shouldn't I?
Whoever thinks that he alone has speech, or possesses speech or mind above others, when unfolded such men are seen to be empty.
Between the desire And the spasm, Between the potency And the existence, Between the essence And the descent, Falls the Shadow.
It's strange that words are so inadequate. Yet, like the asthmatic struggling for breath, so the lover must struggle for words.
Any religion is forever in danger of petrifaction into mere ritual and habit, though ritual and habit be essential to religion.
Those who talk of the bible as a monument of English prose are merely admiring it as a monument over the grave of Christianity.
When you're safe at home you wish you were having an adventure; when you're having an adventure you wish you were safe at home.
It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.
The idea that being human and having rights are equivalent - that rights are inherent - is unintelligible in a Darwinian world.
Theatre probably originated without texts, but by the time we get to the classical Greek period, theatre has become text-based.
The printed word is no longer as in demand as when I was of the age of pupils or even at the age of the teachers teaching them.
You should not translate for more than two hours at a time. After that, you lose your edge, the language becomes clumsy, rigid.
All the words I use in my stories can be found in the dictionary-it's just a matter of arranging them into the right sentences.
I daresay one profits more by the mistakes one makes off one's own bat than by doing the right thing on somebody's else advice.
She says it's really not very flattering to her that the women who fall in love with her husband are so uncommonly second-rate.
It has amazed me that the most incongruous traits should exist in the same person and, for all that, yield a plausible harmony.
Life experiences inherently change you as a writer. My sense of fury calmed down when I had children and found a loving partner.
I think that, as a writer, while it's your job to construct stories, you have to navigate your way through them with your heart.
Eddie Marsan is just my favourite actor of all time. I love everything he's been in, so it's a dream come true to work with him.
I'm not good at precise, coherent argument. But plays are suited to incoherent argument, put into the mouths of fallible people.
I know each conversation with a psychiatrist in the morning made me want to hang myself because I knew I could not strangle him.
Hell is of this world and there are men who are unhappy escapees from hell, escapees destined ETERNALLY to reenact their escape.
You vote yourselves salaries out of the public funds and care only for your own personal interests; hence the state limps along.
I cannot sleep for dreaming; I cannot dream but I wake and walk about the house as though I'd find you coming through some door.
I've never seen 'Seinfeld', never seen 'The Cosby Show'; I just don't watch it. I saw half of 'Oprah' one time. I'd rather read.
If they tell you that she died of sleeping pills you must know that she died of a wasting grief, of a slow bleeding at the soul.
I don't enjoy getting knocked about on a football field for other people's amusement. I enjoy it if I'm being paid a lot for it.
I don't feel that catharsis in a play necessarily takes place during the course of a play. Often it should take place afterward.
Optimistic lies have such immense therapeutic value that a doctor who cannot tell them convincingly has mistaken his profession.
The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it, and become blind to the arguments against it.
In a battle all you need to make you fight is a little hot blood and the knowledge that it's more dangerous to lose than to win.
I am the most spontaneous speaker in the world because every word, every gesture, and every retort has been carefully rehearsed.
The British are apt to make merits of their stupidities, and to represent their various incapacities as points of good breeding.
Let no one suppose that the words doctor and patient can disguise from the parties the fact that they are employer and employee.
For four wicked centuries the world has dreamed this foolish dream of efficiency; and the end is not yet. But the end will come.
Every drunken skipper trusts to Providence. But one of the ways of Providence with drunken skippers is to run them on the rocks.
A serious illness or a death advertises the doctor exactly as a hanging advertises the barrister who defended the person hanged.
Of all human struggles there is none so treacherous and remorseless as the struggle between the artist man and the mother woman.
Idiots are always in favour of inequality of income (their only chance of eminence), and the really great in favour of equality.
I was brought up in the War. I was an adolescent in the Second World War. And I did witness in London a great deal of the Blitz.