In January 1962, when I was the author of one and a half unperformed plays, I attended a student production of ‘The Birthday Party’ at the Victoria Rooms in Bristol. Just before it began, I realised that Harold Pinter was sitting in front of me.
I doubt that art needed Ruskin any more than a moving train needs one of its passengers to shove it.
It takes a lot of effort to be vibrant.
The truth is always a compound of two half- truths, and you never reach it, because there is always something more to say.
Underneath runs the main current of preoccupation, which is keeping one’s nose clean at all times. This means that when things go wrong you have to pass the blame along the line, like pass-the-parcel, till the music stops.
Since we cannot hope for order, let us withdraw with style from the chaos.
We’ve traveled too far, and our momentum has taken over; we move idly towards eternity, without possibility of reprieve or hope of explanation.
It is better of course to know useless things than to know nothing.
Chater: You dare to call me that. I demand satisfaction! Septimus: Mrs Chater demanded satisfaction and now you are demanding satisfaction. I cannot spend my time day and night satisfying the demands of the Chater family.
Audiences know what to expect, and that is all that they are prepared to believe in.
ROS: Why don’t you go and have a look? GUIL: Pragmatism?! – is that all you have to offer?
GUIL: A scientific approach to the examination of phenomena is a defence against the pure emotion of fear.
We drift down time, clutching at straws. But what good’s a brick to a drowning man?
Uncertainty is the normal state.
Death is the ultimate negative.
It’s the wanting to know that makes us matter.
Well, we’ll know better next time.
All your life you live so close to truth, it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye, and when something nudges it into outline it is like being ambushed by a grotesque.
I’ve lost all capacity for disbelief. I’m not sure that I could even rise to a little gentle scepticism.
It’s not the voting that’s democracy; it’s the counting.