Seduced her? Every time I turned round she was up a library ladder. In the end I gave in. That reminds me—I spotted something between her legs that made me think of you.

Your opinions are your symptoms.

Hotel rooms inhabit a separate moral universe.

Well, we'll know better next time.

A healthy attitude is contagious but don't wait to catch it from others. Be a carrier.

Death followed by eternity the worst of both worlds. It is a terrible thought.

Fantasy flows in where fact leaves a vacuum.

Happiness is equilibrium. Shift your weight.

Let me get it straight. Your father was king. You were his only son. Your father dies. You are of age. Your uncle becomes king." "Yes." "Unorthodox.

I should have the courage of my lack of convictions.

The universe is deterministic all right, just like Newton said, I mean it's trying to be, but the only thing going wrong is people fancying people who aren't supposed to be in that part of the plan.

We keep to our usual stuff, more or less, only inside out. We do on stage the things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit being an entrance somewhere else.

I write plays because dialogue is the most respectable way of contradicting myself.

VALENTINE: Are you talking about Lord Byron, the poet? BERNARD: No, you fucking idiot, we're talking about Lord Byron, the chartered accountant.

I would join Sisyphus in Hades and gladly push my boulder up the slope if only, each time it rolled back down, I were given a line of Aeschylus.

Player: Relax. Respond. That's what people do. You can't go through life question your sitution at every turn.

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.

Nowadays, an artist is someone who makes art mean the things he does.

We drift down time, clutching at straws. But what good's a brick to a drowning man?

Carnal embrace is the practice of throwing one's arms around a side of beef.

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

Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light.

You think human nature is a beast, that it must be put in a cage. But it's the cage that makes the animal bad.

ROS: Why don't you go and have a look? GUIL: Pragmatism?! - is that all you have to offer?

We're better at predicting events at the edge of the galaxy or inside the nucleus of an atom than whether it'll rain on auntie's garden party three Sundays from now.

(Words) deserve respect. Get the right ones in the right order, and you can nudge the world a little.

If you want to change something by Tuesday, theater is no good. Journalism is what does that. But, if you want to just alter the chemistry of the moral matrix, then theater has a longer half-life.

...and for the last three minutes on the wind of a windless day I have heard the sound of drums and flute...

It is better to be quotable than to be honest.

The natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster. strangely enough it all works out in the end... it's a mystery.

The bad end unhappily; the good, unluckily. That is what tragedy means.

THOMASINA: But then the Egyptian noodle made carnal embrace with the enemy who burned the great library of Alexandria without so much as a fine for all that is overdue!

Traitors hoist by their own petard?--or victims of the gods?--we shall never know!

Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering.

You are an over-excited little man, with a need for self-expression far beyond the scope of your natural gifts. This is not discreditable. Neither does it make you an artist.

Death is the ultimate negative.

It takes character to withstand the rigours of indolence.

I fell in love with literature and stayed lovesick all my life.

Confession is an act of violence against the unoffending.

I believe in mess, tears, pain, self-abasement, loss of self-respect, nakedness. Not caring doesn’t seem much different from not loving.

What is an artist? For every thousand people there's nine hundred doing the work, ninety doing well, nine doing good, and one lucky bastard who's the artist.

As Socrates so philosophically put it, since we don't know what death is, it is illogical to fear it.

Can't you function unless you're losing?

There must have been a time, in the beginning, when we could have said – no. But somehow we missed it. Oh well, we'll know better next time.

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

Now for a handful of guilders I happen to have a private and uncut performance of the rape of the Sabine Women - or rather woman, or rather Alfred -Get your skirt on Alfred!

You stupid woman, if rationality were the criterion for things being allowed to exist, the world would be one gigantic field of soya beans!

To say that it is without pace, point, focus, interest, drama, wit or originality is to say simply that it does not happen to be my cup of tea.

Kissing girls is not like science, nor is it like sport. It is the third thing when you thought there were only two.