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Quotes by Playwright
"Dublin university contains the cream of Ireland: Rich and thick."
134
"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."
132
"There is not a passion so strongly rooted in the human heart as envy."
130
"If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average."
124
"I'm called away by particular business - but I leave my character behind me."
113
"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."
113
"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."
110
"The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself."
107
"Visual surprise is natural in the Caribbean; it comes with the landscape, and faced with its beauty, the sigh of History dissolves."
103
"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."
102
"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."
101
"A culture, we all know, is made by its cities."
100
"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."
98
"Because that is what such a city is, in the New World, a writer's heaven."
98
"Eagles commonly fly alone. They are crows, daws, and starlings that flock together."
83
"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."
80
"Innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm."
78
"They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more."
75
"Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets."
74
"Pain makes man think. Thought makes man wise. Wisdom makes life endurable."
74
"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,
73
"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."
73
"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."
72
"Won't you come into the garden? I would like my roses to see you."
72
"Media is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism."
70
"There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in."
70
"There is love of course. And then there's life, its enemy."
63
"I cannot stand public attention, I just can't. Of course, if I may I might write something instead."
62
"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."
59
"Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that. Yes, yes, it's the most comical thing in the world."
58
"All the mistakes I ever made were when I wanted to say 'No' and said 'Yes'."
57
"A suicide kills two people, Maggie, that's what it's for!"
56
"Though lust do masque in ne'er so strange disguise she's oft found witty, but is never wise."
56
"Everytime a child says 'I don't believe in fairies' there is a a little fairy somewhere that falls down dead."
56
"Kant thought things, not because they were true, but because he was Kant."
56
"I may climb perhaps to no great heights, but I will climb alone."
55
"Tragedy is restful: and the reason is that hope, that foul, deceitful thing, has no part in it."
54
"Without alienation, there can be no politics."
54
"My first few plays took place in the South and even The Lucky Spot was in the thirties but in Louisiana."
53
"A coquette is like a recruiting sergeant, always on the lookout for fresh victims."
52
"We have no reliable guarantee that the afterlife will be any less exasperating than this one, have we?"
52
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