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

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

William Golding

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.

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.

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

Arthur Wing Pinero

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

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

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 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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

William Gerhardie

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

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

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

W. Somerset Maugham

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?

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

William John Locke

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.

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

Richard Flecknoe

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