Great Throughts Treasury

"Donner: Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art."

"Don't you see!? We're actors — we're the opposite of people!"

"Dotty: Archie says the Church is a monument to irrationality. George: ... The National Gallery is a monument to irrationality! Every concert hall is a monument to irrationality! — and so is a nicely kept garden, or a lover's favour, or a home for stray dogs! You stupid woman, if rationality were the criterion for things being allowed to exist, the world would be one gigantic field of soya beans!"

"Dying is not romantic, and death is not a game which will soon be over... Death is not anything... death is not... It's the absence of presence, nothing more... the endless time of never coming back... a gap you can't see, and when the wind blows through it, it makes not sound..."

"Each move is dictated by the previous one--that is the meaning of order"

"Eternity is a terrible thought. I mean, where is it going to end?"

"Everything has to be taken on trust; truth is only that what is taken to be true. It's the currency if living. There may be nothing behind it, but it doesn't make any difference so long as it is honored. One acts on assumptions. What do you assume?"

"Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable."

"For a long time I managed to think two things simultaneously, that I am actually a good playwright, and that the next time I write a play I will be revealed as someone who is no good at all."

"Fifty-five crystal spheres geared to God’s crankshaft is my idea of a satisfying universe. I can’t think of anything more trivial than quarks, quasars, big bangs, and black holes."

"Fantasy flows in where fact leaves a vacuum."

"From principles is derived probability, but truth or certainty is obtained only from facts."

"Get me inside any boardroom and I'll get any decision I want."

"From as long as, literally as far back as I can remember I've liked puns, word jokes, I can literally recall looking at a comic at the age of six or seven and I remember what I enjoyed and what it was precisely and how the joke worked."

"Good things, when short, are twice as good."

"Give us this day our daily mask."

"GUIL: It [Hamlet's madness] really boils down to symptoms. Pregnant replies, mystic allusions, mistaken identities, arguing his father is his mother, that sort of thing; intimations of suicide, forgoing of exercise, loss of mirth, hints of claustrophobia not to say delusions of imprisonment; invocations of camels, chameleons, capons, whales, weasels, hawks, handsaws -- riddles, quibbles and evasions; amnesia, paranoia, myopia; day-dreaming, hallucinations; stabbing his elders, abusing his parents, insulting his lover, and appearing hatless in public -- knock-kneed, droop-stockinged and sighing like a love-sick schoolboy, which at his age is coming on a bit strong. ROS: And talking to himself. GUIL: And talking to himself."

"HANNAH: Don't let Bernard get to you. It's only performance art, you know. Rhetoric, they used to teach it in ancient times, like PT. It's not about being right, they had philosophy for that. Rhetoric was their chat show. Bernard's indignation is a sort of aerobics for when he gets on television."

"GUIL: A scientific approach to the examination of phenomena is a defense against the pure emotion of fear"

"HANNAH: English landscape was invented by gardeners imitating foreign painters who were evoking classical authors. The whole thing was brought home in the luggage from the Grand Tour. Here, look -- Capability Brown doing Claude, who was doing Virgil. Arcadia! And here, superimposed by Richard Noakes, untamed nature in the style of Salvator Rosa. It's the Gothic novel expressed in landscape. Everything but vampires."

"Happiness is equilibrium. Shift your weight."

"Hell is very likely to be modernization infinitely extended."

"He says his aim is poetry. One does not aim at poetry with pistols. At poets, perhaps."

"HENRY: Leave me out of it. They don’t count. Maybe Brodie got a raw deal, maybe he didn’t. I don’t know. It doesn’t count. He’s a lout with language. I can’t help somebody who thinks, or thinks he thinks, that editing a newspaper is censorship, or that throwing bricks is a demonstration while building tower blocks is social violence, or that unpalatable statement is provocation while disrupting the speaker is the exercise of free speech…Words don’t deserve that kind of malarkey. They’re innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they’re no good any more, and Brodie knocks their corners off. I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you’re dead."

"Herzen: Marx is a bourgeois from the anus up. Natalie : Alexander! I won't have that word... Herzen: Sorry, middle-class."

"He's never known anything like it! But then, he has never known anything to write home about, so this is nothing to write home about."

"I agree with everything you say, but I would attack to the death your right to say it."

"He's someone who flies around from hotel to hotel and thinks the most interesting thing about any story is the fact that he has arrived to cover it"

"Hotel rooms inhabit a separate moral universe."

"How the hell do I know what I find incredible? Credibility is an expanding field... Sheer disbelief hardly registers on the face before the head is nodding with all the wisdom of instant hindsight."

"I am not my body. My body is nothing without me."

"I began my talk by saying that I had not written my plays for purposes of discussion. At once, I felt a ripple of panic run through the hall. I suddenly realized why. To everyone present, discussion was the whole point of drama. That was why the faculty had been endowed — that was why all those buildings had been put up! I had undermined the entire reason for their existence."

"I consider myself to be a very fortunate person and to have led a very fortunate life."

"I do not pretend to understand the universe. It is a great deal bigger than I am."

"I don't act, I don't direct, I don't design."

"I didn't feel good about cutting out parts of very famous speeches... You think you somehow need all of it or you get none of it, but that's not true."

"I got dizzy, he explained. I should think you did. What were you doing?' Nothing, said Moon. I was trying to face one way or the other and I got confused and fell over. Let that be my epitaph."

"I had no idea Gwendolen knew any foreign languages, and I am not sure that I approve. It's the sort of thing that can only broaden a girl's mind."

"I know the British press is very attached to the lobby system. It lets the journalists and the politicians feel proud of their traditional freedoms while giving the reader as much of the truth as they think is good for him."

"I learned three things in Zurich during the war. I wrote them down. Firstly, you're either a revolutionary or you're not, and if you're not you might as well be an artist as anything else. Secondly, if you can't be an artist, you might as well be a revolutionary... I forget the third thing."

"I love love. I love having a lover and being one. The insularity of passion. I love it. I love the way it blurs the distinction between everyone who isn't one's lover."

"I don't keep a diary and I throw away nearly all the paper I might have kept. I don't keep an archive. There's something worrying about my make-up that I try to leave no trace of myself apart from my plays."

"I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you might nudge the world a little or make a poem that children will speak for you when you are dead."

"I don't think Stoppardian has a precise definition."

"I don't think I can be expected to take seriously any game which takes less than three days to reach its conclusion."

"I feel overestimated."

"I mean, if Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at twenty-two, the history of music would have been very different. As would the history of aviation, of course."

"I shall have poetry in my life. And adventure. And love, love, love, above all. Love as there has never been in a play. Unbiddable, ungovernable, like a riot in the heart and nothing to be done, come ruin or rapture."

"I never got used to the way the house Trots fell into the jargon back in Grimsby — I mean, on any other subject, like the death of the novel, or the sex life of the editor's secretary, they spoke ordinary English, but as soon as they started trying to get me to join the strike it was as if their brains had been taken out and replaced by one of those little golf-ball things you get in electric typewriters... Betrayal... Confrontation... Management... My God, you'd need a more supple language than that to describe an argument between two amoebas."

"I must stop compromising my plays with this whiff of social application. They must be entirely untouched by any suspicion of usefulness."