"What freedom means, is being allowed to sing in my bath as loudly as will not interfere with my neighbour's freedom to sing a different tune in his."

"I'm a playwright who gets involved in movies when I'm not writing a play."

"It is a defect of God's humor that he directs our hearts everywhere but to those who have a right to them."

"A lesson in folly is worth two in wisdom."

"Real data is messy. ...It's all very noisy out there. Very hard to spot the tune. Like a piano in the next room, it's playing your song, but unfortunately it's out of whack, some of the strings are missing, and the pianist is tone deaf and drunk- I mean, the noise! Impossible!"

"It's not the voting that's democracy; it's the counting."

"We give advice by the bucket, but take it by the grain."

"Carnal embrace is sexual congress, which is the insertion of the male genital organ into the female genital organ for purposes of procreation and pleasure. Fermat's last theorem, by contrast, asserts that when x, y and z are whole numbers each raised to power of n, the sum of the first two can never equal the third when n is greater than 2."

"A man speaking sense to himself is no madder than a man speaking nonsense not to himself."

"Wheels have been set in motion, and they have their own pace, to which we are...condemned. Each move is dictated by the previous one - that is the meaning of order. If we start being arbitrary it'll just be a shambles: at least, let us hope so. Because if we happened, just happened to discover, or even suspect, that our spontaneity was part of their order, we'd know that we were lost. A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty - and, by which definition, a philosopher - dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him; his two-fold security."

"James Joyce - an essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized."

"If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older."

"Seduced her? Every time I turned round she was up a library ladder. In the end I gave in. That reminds me-I spotted something between her legs that made me think of you."

"I once did a radio program with a famous materialist, that is to say a scientist who believed that absolutely everything was physical and that all emotions were reductive to little electrical impulses in your neurons. And I found that I didn't believe that. But what the emotions really are, I don't have an alternative theory."

"Chater: You dare to call me that. I demand satisfaction!Septimus: Mrs Chater demanded satisfaction and now you are demanding satisfaction. I cannot spend my time day and night satisfying the demands of the Chater family."

"When I was 20, the idea of having a play on anywhere was just beyond my dreams."

"I mean, if Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at twenty-two, the history of music would have been very different. As would the history of aviation, of course."

"Being a person is respect, because you're not a cat or a dog or a bunch of tulips, you're a human person and humanness isn't like something there can be different amounts of, it's maxed out from the start, total respect every time - kill one, kill a trainload, you're dissing the transcendental is all."

"Age is a high price to pay for maturity."

"Death followed by eternity the worst of both worlds. It is a terrible thought."

"Uncertainty is the normal state."

"I feel that when I began writing, I had a need to know more about the play before I got into it. I think that's the way I was thinking. But my actual experience is that the best way to find out what the structure is, is by writing the play out laterally. You just have got to be brave enough to start without knowing where you are going."

"Childhood is Last Chance Gulch for happiness. After that, you know too much."

"He's never known anything like it! But then, he has never known anything to write home about, so this is nothing to write home about."

"From principles is derived probability, but truth or certainty is obtained only from facts."

"Everything has to be taken on trust truth is only that which is taken to be true. It's the currency of living. There may be nothing behind it but it doesn't make any difference so long as it is honoured."

"Atheism is a crutch for those who cannot bear the reality of God."

"That I have the right to express myself freely at all times in all circumstances entails the idea that free speech is a 'basic human right' possessed by each individual, and, as such, trumps the interests of the society or group, including my neighbour."

"Chekhov was capable of casually tossing off deplorable comments in his letters, combined with a very modern anger against anti-Semitism."

"Theater in New York is nearer to the street. In London, you have to go deep into the building, usually, to reach the place where theater happens. On Broadway, only the fire doors separate you from the sidewalk, and you're lucky if the sound of a police car doesn't rip the envelope twice a night."

"A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty-and, by which definition, a philosopher-dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him; in his two-fold security."

"When you write, it's making a certain kind of music in your head. There's a rhythm to it, a pulse, and on the whole, I'm writing to that drum rather than the psychological process."

"It's better to be quotable than to be honest."

"THOMASINA:But then the Egyptian noodle made carnal embrace with the enemy who burned the great library of Alexandria without so much as a fine for all that is overdue!"

"What are a friend's books for if not to be borrowed?"

"When I was twelve I was obsessed. Everything was sex. Latin was sex. The dictionary fell open at 'meretrix', a harlot. You could feel the mystery coming off the word like musk. 'Meretrix'! This was none of your mensa-a-table, this was a flash from a forbidden planet, and it was everywhere. History was sex, French was sex, art was sex, the Bible, poetry, penfriends, games, music, everything was sex except biology which was obviously sex but not really sex, not the one which was secret and ecstatic and wicked and a sacrament and all the things it was supposed to be but couldn't be at one and the same time - I got that in the boiler room and it turned out to be biology after all."

"The media. It sounds like a convention of spiritualists."

"Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little."

"The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means."

"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."

"No one gets up after death-there is no applause-there is only silence and some second-hand clothes, and that's death."

"What is the society we wish to protect? Is it the society of complete surveillance for the commonwealth? Is this the wealth we seek to have in common - optimal security at the cost of maximal surveillance?"

"My intention still is to write a play to commemorate, possibly rather skeptically, the 50th anniversary of the Russian revolution. I started it at the beginning of 1966, but confronted with the enormous importance and reality of that revolution, I absolutely boggle. I don't know what to do about it."

"It is better of course to know useless things than to know nothing."

"The House of Lords, an illusion to which I have never been able to subscribe - responsibility without power, the prerogative of the eunuch throughout the ages."

"My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful; but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful."

"I think I give the impression of being a romantic, and I think inside I'm quite severe. But some might say they had the opposite impression of me."

"Words... They're innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they're no good any more... I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you're dead."

"It's where we're nearest to our humanness. Useless knowledge for its own sake. Useful knowledge is good, too, but it's for the faint-hearted, an elaboration of the real thing, which is only to shine some light, it doesn't matter where on what, it's the light itself, against the darkness, it's what's left of God's purpose when you take away God."

"Hotel rooms inhabit a separate moral universe."