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.

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...

I looked on astounded as from his ordinary life he made his art. We were both ordinary men, he and I. Yet from the ordinary he created Legends–and I from Legends created only the ordinary!

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...

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.

Tell me, before you call us servants, who served whom? And who, I wonder, in your generations, will immortalize you?

I began to read everything I could about Mozart, who I’ve always felt, I suppose, to be the greatest of all composers. I still think so.

My actual childhood, as opposed to my adolescence, was not spent in London.

A child is born into a world of phenomena all equal in their power to enslave.

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...

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...

There is now, in my mouth, this sharp chain. And it never comes out.

I really believe that studying organization, even in the form of studying detective story organization, is very, very valuable for a playwright, a budding playwright.

Tragedy, for me, is not a conflict between right and wrong, but between two different kinds of right.

Rehearsing a play is making the word flesh. Publishing a play is reversing the process.

I think I did have fantasies about being an actor. In fact, I know I did.

You can’t always let people do their own thing.

Everything we feel is made of Time. All the beauties of life are shaped by it.

I think people nowadays do tend to blame their parents for everything.

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.

Passion, you see, can be destroyed by a doctor. It cannot be created.

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.

The trouble is if you don’t spend your life yourself, other people spend it for you.

But the first published thing I did was a detective story, detective novel, and I did that on my own.

He’s not coming to Boston.

I think possibly the first film that has music as its leading character.

What use, after all, is man, if not to teach God His lessons?

Librarians as a race tend to be tedious.

I was an accomplice in my own frustration.

If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting.

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.

I was born in Liverpool in England, and I lived there for the first nine years of my life.

Goodness is nothing in the furnace of art.