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Quotes by Playwright
"It's an extraordinary thing about Mozart is that you never tire of him... he never bores me, and he doesn't... not only bore me, that's too strong a word."
Word,
"My actual childhood, as opposed to my adolescence, was not spent in London."
"Passion, you see, can be destroyed by a doctor. It cannot be created."
"Rehearsing a play is making the word flesh. Publishing a play is reversing the process."
"They look so expectant, and then they look so depressed... that was the other great lesson that The Royal Hunt of the Sun taught me, it was the profundity that masked drama can achieve, that of course, the audience were not seeing masks moving at all."
"Tragedy, for me, is not a conflict between right and wrong, but between two different kinds of right."
"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."
"You never quite know what's going to strike your imagination, or something that won't going to leave you alone, not going to leave alone, and this was one for me."
"It is very, very difficult for a playwright to write a scene in which a young man has his first deep experience of sex with a girl whom he found immensely attractive, is fully satisfied by this event and gets up and blinds a lot of horses."
1
"Watching Italian opera, all those male sopranos screeching, stupid fat couples rolling their eyes about. That's not love, it's just rubbish."
"And in fact, I think one of the best guides to telling you who you are, and I think children use it all the time for this purpose, is fantasy."
"Black Comedy is a farce that is played in the dark, as you know, with the lights full on. It's the Chinese convention of reversing light and dark, and exactly where anybody is at any given moment is the play."
"But the first published thing I did was a detective story, detective novel, and I did that on my own."
"I made, over the years in Cambridge, several very good American friends, and America appeared to me, a land of promise in every sense of that word, a land of freedom from the inhibitions and restrictions that I felt in England."
"I think I did have fantasies about being an actor. In fact, I know I did."
"I think people nowadays do tend to blame their parents for everything."
"I think plays, like books, are endemic. They grow out of the soil of the writer and the place he's writing about. I think, you just can't move them about, you know."
"I think possibly the first film that has music as its leading character."
"If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting."
"I was born in Liverpool in England, and I lived there for the first nine years of my life."
"Everything we feel is made of Time. All the beauties of life are shaped by it."
"Faith is believing in things when common sense tells you not to."
"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."
"There's a lot of bad isms floating around this world, but one of the worst is commercialism."
"Of course the illusion of art is to make one believe that great literature is very close to life, but exactly the opposite is true. Life is amorphous, literature is formal."
"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."
"To jealousy, nothing is more frightful than laughter."
"The one thing I regret is that I will never have time to read all the books I want to read."
"One can never speak enough of the virtues, the dangers, the power of shared laughter."
"Jazz music is an intensified feeling of nonchalance."
"It seems to me that there are two kinds of trickery: the "fronts" people assume before one another's eyes, and the "front" a writer puts on the face of reality."
"Every little girl knows about love. It is only her capacity to suffer because of it that increases."
Love,
"A dress makes no sense unless it inspires men to take it off of you."
"After Proust, there are certain things that simply cannot be done again. He marks off for you the boundaries of your talent."
"Money will never make you happy and happy will never make you money."
"Say, the next time I see you, remind me not to talk to you, will you?"
"Men and women of high professional standing have been reduced to the status of vagrants."
"When he asked me, with obvious self-satisfaction, what I thought of the scenario, I hardly knew how to answer. I asked if he had seen the play and was hardly surprised when he said no."
"There's no such thing, you know, as picking out the best woman: it's only a question of comparative badness, brother."
"Nothing but heaven itself is better than a friend who is really a friend."
"Drama is action, sir, action and not confounded philosophy."
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