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Quotes by Playwright
"People are wrong when they say opera is not what it used to be. It is what it used to be. That is what's wrong with it."
88
"Dublin university contains the cream of Ireland: Rich and thick."
81
"There is not a passion so strongly rooted in the human heart as envy."
74
"I'm called away by particular business - but I leave my character behind me."
70
"If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average."
68
"This is Port of Spain to me, a city ideal in its commercial and human proportions, where a citizen is a walker and not a pedestrian, and this is how Athens may have been before it became a cultural echo."
66
"Well we took it apart scene by scene. We examined every sentence, every full stop, every comma. He has a most wonderful eye for detail, Roman, and you know, he's a very good artist."
62
"Memory that yearns to join the centre, a limb remembering the body from which it has been severed, like those bamboo thighs of the god."
62
"The sigh of History rises over ruins, not over landscapes, and in the Antilles there are few ruins to sigh over, apart from the ruins of sugar estates and abandoned forts."
62
"When the characters are really alive before their author, the latter does nothing but follow them in their action, in their words, in the situations which they suggest to him."
59
"The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself."
57
"To say yes, you have to sweat and roll up your sleeves and plunge both hands into life up to the elbows. It is easy to say no, even if saying no means death."
56
"Pain makes man think. Thought makes man wise. Wisdom makes life endurable."
56
"The personal vocabulary, the individual melody whose metre is one's biography, joins in that sound, with any luck, and the body moves like a walking, a waking island."
55
"Visual surprise is natural in the Caribbean; it comes with the landscape, and faced with its beauty, the sigh of History dissolves."
55
"Because that is what such a city is, in the New World, a writer's heaven."
53
"Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets."
52
"A culture, we all know, is made by its cities."
51
"Eagles commonly fly alone. They are crows, daws, and starlings that flock together."
50
"Won't you come into the garden? I would like my roses to see you."
45
"I cannot stand public attention, I just can't. Of course, if I may I might write something instead."
45
"Innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm."
43
"They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more."
41
"There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in."
39
"Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that. Yes, yes, it's the most comical thing in the world."
39
"Without alienation, there can be no politics."
38
"I may climb perhaps to no great heights, but I will climb alone."
37
"Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole."
Love,
37
"There is love of course. And then there's life, its enemy."
36
"Media is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism."
36
"A coquette is like a recruiting sergeant, always on the lookout for fresh victims."
34
"I think it's a mistake to ever look for hope outside of one's self."
34
"You must promise me. You can't desire the end without desiring the means.'Ah, but one can, he thought, one can: one can desire the peace of victory without desiring the ravaged towns."
34
"A suicide kills two people, Maggie, that's what it's for!"
33
"In the theater, while you recognized that you were looking at a house, it was a house in quotation marks. On screen, the quotation marks tend to be blotted out by the camera."
33
"Dreams do come true, if we only wish hard enough, You can have anything in life if you will sacrifice everything else for it."
33
"No, I can't write treatments, I think there's a danger with treatments. That you... you write out your first excitement and enthusiasm in a prose treatment."
32
"Everytime a child says 'I don't believe in fairies' there is a a little fairy somewhere that falls down dead."
32
"If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom, and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too."
31
"My first few plays took place in the South and even The Lucky Spot was in the thirties but in Louisiana."
31
"Kant thought things, not because they were true, but because he was Kant."
31
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