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Quotes by Playwright
"A brain was only capable of what it could conceive, and it couldn't conceive what it had never experienced."
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"I have never understood why people who can swallow the enormous improbability of a personal God boggle at a personal Devil."
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"A wise man is superior to any insults which can be put upon him, and the best reply to unseemly behavior is patience and moderation."
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"Democracy's a very fragile thing. You have to take care of democracy. As soon as you stop being responsible to it and allow it to turn into scare tactics, it's no longer democracy, is it? It's something else. It may be an inch away from totalitarianism."
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"Hope is the feeling that the feeling you have isn't permanent."
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"We... our war began September the 3rd 1939, with the invasion of Poland by Germany, and thereafter the great state of danger in England at that time, with the bombings, necessitated the evacuation of children."
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"We are suffocated by writers who want to enlighten us with their truths. For me, the theatre is beautiful because it is a secret, and secrets seduce us, we all want to share secrets."
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"The English sent all their bores abroad, and acquired the Empire as a punishment."
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"In the past goodness was always a collective experience. Then goodness became privatised."
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"Every action of our lives touches on some chord that will vibrate in eternity."
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"The theater is so endlessly fascinating because it's so accidental. It's so much like life."
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"In my plays I want to look at life - at the commonplace of existence-as if we had just turned a corner and run into it for the first time."
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"If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, it's just possible you haven't grasped the situation."
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"This free will business is a bit terrifying anyway. It's almost pleasanter to obey, and make the most of it."
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"A Kerry footballer with an inferiority complex is one who thinks he's just as good as everybody else."
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"Slogans which deafened us so that we could not hear the truth."
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"Later we learned that it was one of our own men hanging on the wire. Nobody could do anything for him; two men had already tried to save him, only to be shot themselves."
Men,
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"Money does not make you happy but it quiets the nerves."
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"IBM has taken a leadership role in this area and is prepared to be a technology partner with companies around the world to take advantage of these new developments."
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"I am at war... with the principal personage of traditional philosophy, that abstract subject who masquerades as everyone and anyone, but is really a male subject in disguise."
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"I have always been a writer of letters, and of long ones; so, when I first thought of writing a book in the form of letters, I knew that I could do it quickly and easily."
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"But we are not in the world to be good but to change it."
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"Part of that is that New York has proved to be too much fun for me to live and work; I love New York so much."
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"The impetus behind going to graduate school was a year after graduating from college spent in Dallas working at the dog food factory and Bank America and not having met success in my chosen field, which at that point was being an actress."
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"Success took me to her bosom like a maternal boa constrictor."
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"When humanness is lost the radical difference between the bodies in the pit and people walking on the street is lost."
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"I wish I were one of those terribly clever people who, when they write their autobiographies, always say, when I was fifteen months old I distinctly remember my Aunt Fanny saying to me, etc."
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"When I hear the word culture - I release the safety-catch of my Browning."
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"Sentimentality is the only sentiment that rubs you the wrong way."
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"I never deliberately set out to shock, but when people don't walk out of my plays I think there is something wrong."
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"Eroding solidarity paradoxically makes a society more susceptible to the construction of substitute collectives and fascisms of all kinds."
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"Mistakes can be good things, because it is an unexpected thing."
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"I acted in junior high in the junior high school group, and then when I got into senior high I was, you know, the main actor of the senior high school."
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"Of all the noises known to man, opera is the most expensive."
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"Frenchmen have an unlimited capacity for gallantry and indulge it on every occasion."
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"A quotation in a speech, article or book is like a rifle in the hands of an infantryman. It speaks with authority."
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"Esteem must be founded on preference: to hold everyone in high esteem is to esteem nothing."
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"I think I did have fantasies about being an actor. In fact, I know I did."
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"Writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary."
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