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Quotes by Playwright
"There is not a passion so strongly rooted in the human heart as envy."
197
"If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average."
191
"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."
178
"The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself."
178
"I'm called away by particular business - but I leave my character behind me."
177
"Visual surprise is natural in the Caribbean; it comes with the landscape, and faced with its beauty, the sigh of History dissolves."
172
"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."
169
"Dublin university contains the cream of Ireland: Rich and thick."
169
"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."
168
"Because that is what such a city is, in the New World, a writer's heaven."
167
"A culture, we all know, is made by its cities."
165
"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."
165
"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."
164
"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."
155
"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,
134
"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."
129
"Eagles commonly fly alone. They are crows, daws, and starlings that flock together."
104
"They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more."
104
"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."
98
"Innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm."
97
"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."
94
"Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets."
91
"Pain makes man think. Thought makes man wise. Wisdom makes life endurable."
91
"Won't you come into the garden? I would like my roses to see you."
91
"There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in."
89
"Media is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism."
84
"Kant thought things, not because they were true, but because he was Kant."
84
"There is love of course. And then there's life, its enemy."
83
"My first few plays took place in the South and even The Lucky Spot was in the thirties but in Louisiana."
82
"I may climb perhaps to no great heights, but I will climb alone."
82
"Though lust do masque in ne'er so strange disguise she's oft found witty, but is never wise."
82
"I cannot stand public attention, I just can't. Of course, if I may I might write something instead."
82
"Tragedy is restful: and the reason is that hope, that foul, deceitful thing, has no part in it."
80
"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."
78
"A suicide kills two people, Maggie, that's what it's for!"
76
"Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that. Yes, yes, it's the most comical thing in the world."
75
"Everytime a child says 'I don't believe in fairies' there is a a little fairy somewhere that falls down dead."
74
"Why doesn't hatred kill desire? I would have given anything to sleep. I would have behaved like a schoolboy if I had believed in the possibility of a substitute. But there was a time when I had tried to find a substitute, and it hadn't worked."
74
"You know what the critics are. If you tell the truth they only say you're cynical and it does an author no good to get a reputation for cynicism."
74
"It is my art. I am better at it than I ever was. And I will do it as long as I can. When you reach a certain age you can slough off what is unnecessary and concentrate on what is. And why not?"
72
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