It takes time for the absent to assume their true shape in our thoughts. After death they take on a firmer outline and then cease to change.

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

Don’t clap too hard – it’s a very old building.

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.

Prithee don’t screw your wit beyond the compass of good manners.

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...

Heroes, whatever high ideas we may have of them, are mortal and not divine. We are all as God made us and many of us much worse.

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...

You know, one had as good be out of the world, as out of the fashion.

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.

Why do I do this every Sunday? Even the book reviews seem to be the same as last week’s. Different books same reviews.

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.

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.

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

They spend their time looking forward to the past.

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...

I begin to perceive that I am a woman. What that is, heaven knows… the philosophy is yet to be written, there is a world to be explored.

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...

It is not true that drink changes a man’s character. It may reveal it more clearly.

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.

I wrote my first play when I was eight.

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

It is widely held that too much wine will dull a man’s desire. Indeed it will in a dull man.

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

Olivier said that drama is an affair of the heart, or it’s nothing, and he was right.

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

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

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

I never deliberately set out to shock, but when people don’t walk out of my plays I think there is something wrong.

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.

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

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.

Here we are, we’re alone in the universe, there’s no God, it just seems that it all began by something as simple as sunlight striking on a piece of rock. And here we are. We’ve...

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

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

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

Go on – but don’t think you can kill my confidence. I’ve had experts doing it for years.

Librarians as a race tend to be tedious.

I was an accomplice in my own frustration.

There’s no such thing as failure – just waiting for success.

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.