British Playwright Quotes

If you wish to grow thinner, diminish your dinner,
And take to light claret instead of pale ale;
Look down with an utter contempt upon butter,
And never touch bread till its toasted--or stale.

Henry Sambrooke Leigh

Philosophy and Religion-what are they when the wind blows and the water gets up in lumps?

William Golding

In the end I didn't know who I was crying for, but it was something my body wanted to do, as though trying to digest grief.

The paranoiac is the exact image of the ruler. The only difference is their position in the world. One might even think the paranoiac the more impressive of the two because he is sufficient unto himself and cannot be shaken by failure.

Be careful how you talk about God. He's the only God we have. If you let him go he won't come back. He won't even look back over his shoulder. And then what will you do?

On Broadway, only the fire doors separate you from the sidewalk and you're lucky if the sound of a police car doesn't rip the envelope twice a night.

Any human love a man gets he can make fill his life. It's like the grain of mustard-seed.

William John Locke

If the electrician who comes to mend my fuse blows it instead, so I should stop having electricity? I should cut off my light? Socialism is my light, can you understand that?

Loving-kindness is the better part of goodness. It lends grace to the sterner qualities of which this consists.

W. Somerset Maugham

I know your cause is lost, but in the heart / Of all right causes is a cause that cannot lose.

Christopher Fry

My father always said 'There's no free lunch.' My father was right. There's no free lunch and there's no free market. The market is rigged, the market is always rigged, and the rigging is in favour of the people who run the market. That's what the market is. It's a bent casino. The house always wins.

Imagination is as effortless as perception, unless we think it might be 'wrong', which is what our education encourages us to believe.

Keith Johnstone

A wit should no more be sincere, than a woman constant; one argues a decay of parts, as to other of beauty.

William Congreve

For hundreds of pages the closely-reasoned arguments unroll, axioms and theorems interlock. And what remains with us in the end? A general sense that the world can be expressed in closely-reasoned arguments, in interlocking axioms and theorems.

For as the old saying is,
When house and land are gone and spent
Then learning is most excellent.

She's adorned
Amply that in her husband's eye looks lovely,—
The truest mirror that an honest wife
Can see her beauty in.

Whilst we strive To live most free, we're caught in our own toils.

What do you mean, funny? Funny peculiar or funny ha-ha?

Well, every one for himself, and Providence for us all—as the elephant said when he danced among the chickens.

All I ask is the chance to prove that money can't make me happy.

Rooms are a fixed size, which can't be altered without pulling down walls and building new ones. They should be unchanging in shape and proportions. But sometimes they do change depending on who's in them.

I feel like I'm eighty years old. I'm tired of life and my mind wants to die.

The stars, heav'n sentry, wink and seem to die.

Once you smear it, or you scratch it,
It's impossible to match it.

Arthur Wing Pinero

The "Theatre of the Absurd" has become a catch-phrase, much used and much abused. What does it stand for? And how can such a label be justified? Perhaps it will be best to attempt to answer the second question first. There is no organised movement, no school of artists, who claim the label for themselves. A good many playwrights who have been classed under this label, when asked if they belong to the Theatre of the Absurd, will indigniantly reply that they belong to no such movement — and quite rightly so. For each of the playwrights concerned seeks to express no more and no less his own personal vision of the world.
Yet critical concepts of this kind are useful when new modes of expression, new conventions of art arise.