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Quotes by Playwright
"I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me."
104
"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."
70
"I'm called away by particular business - but I leave my character behind me."
54
"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."
52
"There is not a passion so strongly rooted in the human heart as envy."
52
"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."
51
"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."
49
"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."
49
"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."
47
"If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average."
47
"Pain makes man think. Thought makes man wise. Wisdom makes life endurable."
46
"The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself."
43
"Because that is what such a city is, in the New World, a writer's heaven."
42
"Visual surprise is natural in the Caribbean; it comes with the landscape, and faced with its beauty, the sigh of History dissolves."
40
"A culture, we all know, is made by its cities."
40
"Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets."
38
"Eagles commonly fly alone. They are crows, daws, and starlings that flock together."
38
"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."
35
"Won't you come into the garden? I would like my roses to see you."
34
"I cannot stand public attention, I just can't. Of course, if I may I might write something instead."
34
"They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more."
32
"Without alienation, there can be no politics."
31
"Innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm."
30
"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,
28
"Media is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism."
28
"There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in."
28
"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."
27
"I think it's a mistake to ever look for hope outside of one's self."
27
"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."
26
"My first few plays took place in the South and even The Lucky Spot was in the thirties but in Louisiana."
25
"I may climb perhaps to no great heights, but I will climb alone."
24
"Everytime a child says 'I don't believe in fairies' there is a a little fairy somewhere that falls down dead."
24
"A coquette is like a recruiting sergeant, always on the lookout for fresh victims."
23
"There is love of course. And then there's life, its enemy."
22
"Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that. Yes, yes, it's the most comical thing in the world."
22
"There's man all over for you, blaming on his boots the fault of his feet."
21
"A suicide kills two people, Maggie, that's what it's for!"
21
"Though lust do masque in ne'er so strange disguise she's oft found witty, but is never wise."
20
"Every true man, sir, who is a little above the level of the beasts and plants does not live for the sake of living, without knowing how to live; but he lives so as to give a meaning and a value of his own to life."
20
"A large nose is the mark of a witty, courteous, affable, generous and liberal man."
19
"Dublin university contains the cream of Ireland: Rich and thick."
19
"James Joyce was a synthesizer, trying to bring in as much as he could. I am an analyzer, trying to leave out as much as I can."
18
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