British Playwright Quotes

Harold Pinter

W. Somerset Maugham

William Golding

Elias Canetti

Tom Stoppard

Spike Milligan

William Congreve

Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.

Adrian Mitchell

You emerge from tragedy equipped against lies. After the musical, you're anybody's fool

I am beset with a dream of fair woman,
Lunatic for Venus flesh...

The wise maketh every thing the means of advantage; and with the same countenance beholdeth he all the faces of fortune: he governeth the good, he conquereth the evil; he is unmov'd in all. Presume not in prosperity, neither despair thou in adversity.

A man who could make so vile a pun would not scruple to pick a pocket.

Still-born Silence! thou that art
Floodgate of the deeper heart.

Richard Flecknoe

I vow and protest there's more plague than pleasure with a secret.

George Colman the Elder

"Shells with lip, or tooth, or bleeding gum,
Tell-tale shells, and shells that whisper 'Come',
Shells that stammer, blush, and yet are dumb – "
"O let me hear!"

Thomas Sturge Moore

I am very bothered when I think of the bad things I have done in my life. Not least that time in the chemistry lab when I held a pair of scissors by the blades and played the handles in the naked lilac flame of the Bunsen burner, then called your name, and handed them over.

I thought I was doing my duty for my country. I didn't know I was going to be treated like a convict. Did it make better soldiers of the callow youths we were then? I doubt it.

Artistic truth is for me literally the highest truth: art may seize the essence of persons and movements no less truly, and certainly far more vitally, than a scientific generalization unifies a chaos of phenomena. Time and Space are only the conditions through which spiritual facts struggle. Hence I have here and there permitted myself liberties with these categories.

Israel Zangwill

The press and politicians. A delicate relationship. Too close, and danger ensues. Too far apart and democracy itself cannot function without the essential exchange of information. Creative leaks, a discreet lunch, interchange in the Lobby, the art of the unattributable telephone call, late at night.

That's the penalty we have to pay for our acts of foolishness - someone else always suffers for them.

With an effort Ewing turned his gaze away from the far end of the bar. Slowly he spread out his hands on the table and examined them. Then he looked up at Wayne. His left eyelid had begun to quiver slightly like a leaf in a gentle breeze as he put the question, but the expression of his face remained unchanged. "Who's the new customer?" Ewing asked indolently.

The onset of bayonets in the hands of the valiant is irresistible.

Yes, I'm in love, I feel it now And Caelia has undone me; And yet I swear I can't tell how The pleasing plague stole on me.

William Whitehead

It seems to me if they ain't got you one way then they've got you another. So what's it all about, that's what I keep asking myself, what's it all about?

Thorkell Mylrea had waited long for a dead man's shoes, but he was wearing them at length.

When a man retires and time is no longer a matter of urgent importance, his colleagues generally present him with a watch.

Adventure must be held in delicate fingers. It should be handled, not embraced. It should be sipped, not swallowed at a gulp.

And suppose we solve all the problems it presents? What happens? We end up with more problems than we started with. Because that's the way problems propagate their species. A problem left to itself dries up or goes rotten. But fertilize a problem with a solution — you'll hatch out dozens.

We are like icebergs in the ocean: one-eighth part consciousness and the rest submerged beneath the surface of articulate apprehension.

William Gerhardie

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.

There's a strange thing goes on inside a bubble. It's hard to describe. People who are in it can't see outside of it, don't believe there is an outside.

First rape a people
simmer for centuries
bring memories to boil
foil voice of drum
add pinch of pain
to rain of rage
stifle drum again
then mix strains of blood
over slow fire
watch fever grow