Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The results of the divorce between truth and human beings can be most graphically observed in politics.
And for the last three minutes on the wind of a windless day I have heard the sound of drums and flute.
I get the impression sometimes that a play arrives in a sequence of events that I have no control over.
'Arcadia' is obviously a play that's got interesting things in it that are perhaps quite hard to grasp.
I've lost all capacity for disbelief. I'm not sure that I could even rise to a little gentle scepticism.
There is no one so radical as a man-servant whose freedom of the champagne bin has been interfered with.
Chekhov understood that people are mysterious and can't be reduced to what we nowadays call 'motivation.'
I barely remembered my father; I'm confused between genuine memory and the few photographs that survived.
The colours red, blue and green are real. The colour yellow is a mystical experience shared by everybody.
There must have been a moment, at the beginning, were we could have said -- no. But somehow we missed it.
GUIL: A scientific approach to the examination of phenomena is a defence against the pure emotion of fear
Because children grow up, we think a child's purpose is to grow up. But a child's purpose is to be a child
I still believe that if your aim is to change the world, journalism is a more immediate short-term weapon.
It is a defect of God's humor that he directs our hearts everywhere but to those who have a right to them.
I can put two and two together, you know. Do not think you are dealing with a man who has lost his grapes.
You don't often get a proposal to do Tolstoy for a really interesting director - that's easy to say yes to.
I really love being in postproduction. First of all, it's all quite self-interested: You can protect things.
I just happen to know quite a lot of what happened in Czechoslovakia between 1968 and the fall of Communism.
When I think of how things could have turned out, I feel as if I've dodged, not just bullets, but 6mm shells.
It seems pointless to be quoted if one isn't going to be quotable ... it's better to be quotable than honest.
The text loses its virginity simply by being staged: it's no longer the abstract ideal version; it's an event.
Player: Relax. Respond. That's what people do. You can't go through life question your sitution at every turn.
A genuine love of learning is one of the two delinquencies which cause blindness and lead a young man to ruin.
A movie camera is like having someone you have a crush on watching you from afar - you pretend it's not there.
You think human nature is a beast, that it must be put in a cage. But it's the cage that makes the animal bad.
I've voted in every election - not always for the same political party and never with any degree of enthusiasm.
Normally, even if you're on the set for 12 hours, there may be only a moment or two when you are actually useful.
In the end, one has to feel lucky that things fell out O.K. I've felt that all the years I've been writing plays.
With plays that require any kind of reading program, I'm reading for a couple of years before using the material.
After all these years, I definitely associate having a pen in my hand with having an ashtray just out of eye line.
I loved the Beatles when they turned up, and the Stones when they turned up, and never really stopped liking them.
I don't believe that we evolved moral psychology; it just doesn't seem plausible to me as a biological phenomenon.
I'm aware of my old plays and occasionally think about them, but I'm much more anxious about finding the next play.
I don't think I can be expected to take seriously any game which takes less than three days to reach its conclusion.
Rewriting isn't just about dialogue; it's the order of the scenes, how you finish a scene, how you get into a scene.
Every age thinks it's the modern age, but this one really is. Electricity is going to change everything. Everything!
I have a spasm of envy for the person that was killed by a falling bookcase, as long as it doesn't happen prematurely.
To be frank: the translations that often sound bad in the mouths of the actors, these have often been done by linguists.
You are the plays you write. How on earth could you write them otherwise? They're projections of your own predilections.
I was so thrilled being a reporter, because it gave you the kind of access to people that you wouldn't ever get to meet.
Schepisi is the sort of director who could, would, and frequently did phone me whenever he came across a textual problem.
James Joyce - an essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized.
If rationality were the criterion for things being allowed to exist, the world would be one gigantic field of soya beans!
Because theatre is a story-telling art form, we feel entitled to assume that the playwright got there before we got there.
I don't look at my work in a critical or analytical way; I just don't think of myself objectively. It doesn't interest me.
The truth is always a compound of two half- truths, and you never reach it, because there is always something more to say.
Maybe Napoleon was wrong when he said we were a nation of shopkeepers... Today England looked like a nation of goalkeepers.
The idea that anybody might be allowed to use their common sense when clearly no harm is being done is part of history now.
If Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of 22, it would have changed the history of music and of aviation.
The possibilities are infinite with new writing; every time you open a new script, there's no limit to what it might contain.