playwright, screenwriter, journalist, film director, translator, writer, theatre critic, film screenwriter
🔗 Read on Wikipedia1937 – 2025
Bennett seems to be showing alarming signs of irony. I have always found that irony among the lower orders is the first sign of an awakening social consciousness. It remains to be seen whether it will grow into an armed seizure of the means of production, distribution and exchange, or spend itself in liberal journalism.
To be an artist at all is like living in Switzerland during a world war. To be an artist in Zurich, in 1917, implies a degree of self-absorption that would have glazed over the eyes of Narcissus.
War is capitalism with the gloves off and many who go to war know it but they go to war because they don't want to be a hero. It takes courage to sit down and be counted.
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 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.
A foreign correspondent is someone who lives in foreign parts and corresponds, usually in the form of essays containing no new facts. Otherwise he's someone who flies around from hotel to hotel and thinks that the most interesting thing about any story is the fact that he has arrived to cover it.
The media. It sounds like a convention of spiritualists.
Milne: No matter how imperfect things are, if you've got a free press everything is correctable, and without it everything is concealable. Ruth: I'm with you on the free press. It's the newspapers I can't stand.
Junk journalism is the evidence of a society that has got at least one thing right, that there should be nobody with the power to dictate where responsible journalism begins.
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 don't act, I don't direct, I don't design.
Mageeba: Do you know what I mean by a relatively free press, Mr. Wagner? Mageeba: I mean a free press which is edited by one of my relatives.
The days of the digitals are numbered. The metaphor is built into them like a self-destruct mechanism.
I'm showing an interest in your work. I thought you liked me showing an interest in your work. My showing. Save the gerund and screw the whale.
Public postures have the configuration of private derangement.
Buddy Holly was twenty-two. Think of what he might have gone on to achieve. 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.
Childhood is Last Chance Gulch for happiness. After that, you know too much.
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.
Chater: You insulted my wife in the gazebo yesterday evening! Septimus: You are mistaken. I made love to your wife in the gazebo. She asked me to meet her there, I have her note somewhere, I dare say I could find it for you, and if someone is putting it about that I did not turn up, by God, sir, it is a slander.
I'd push the lot of you over a cliff myself. Except the one in the wheelchair, I think I'd lose the sympathy vote before people had time to think it through.
It is a defect of God's humour that he directs our hearts everywhere but to those who have a right to them.
It's the wanting to know that makes us matter.
Septimus: When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be all alone, on an empty shore. Thomasina: Then we will dance. Is this a waltz?
I will take his secret to the grave, telling people along the way. Betrayal is no sin if it is whimsical.
The Church's idea of the good and the beautiful excludes sexual aberration, apart from chastity, I suppose because it's the rarest
To dream of taking the sword in the breast, the bullet in the brain [...] and wake up to find the world goes wretchedly on and you will die of age and not of pain.
Alexander: I myself was educated in Italy. My doctorate in philosophy is from the University of Padua. Alexander: Not at all. Worms have no philosophy, as far as is known.
Alexander: No spunk, simple as that! Your brother's an army deserter! the problem. That and Poland.
Michael: "March here, march there, present arms, where's your cap?" — you've no idea, the whole Army's obsessed with playing at soldiers.
Alexander: How the world must have been changing while I was holding it still.
Herzen: Marx is a bourgeois from the anus up. Herzen: Sorry, middle-class.
Bakunin: Act first! The ideas will follow, and if not — well, it's progress
Turgenev: The names for things don't come first. Words stagger after, hopelessly trying to become the sensation.
Their coarseness is the sinew of some kind of brute confidence which is the reason England is home to every shade of political exile. They don't give asylum out of respect for asylum-seekers, but out of respect for themselves. They invented personal liberty, and they know it, and they did it without having any theories about it. They value liberty because it's liberty.
Bakunin: Left to themselves people are noble, generous, uncorrupted, they'd create a completely new kind of society if only people weren't so blind, stupid and selfish. Bakunin: The same people.
Wake me up for breakfast, if I'm not dead.
(Falls down in a drunken stupor): Let's sit down.
I write plays because dialogue is the most respectable way of contradicting myself.
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 realised 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.
If I had been asked to write 1,200 words for a newspaper tomorrow, on any subject, I would just do it rather than leave a white hole in the page. And I think it's a very healthy attitude to take to writing anything.
I still believe that if your aim is to change the world, journalism is a more immediate short-term weapon.
When Harold Pinter was lobbying to have London's Comedy Theatre renamed the Pinter Theatre, Stoppard wrote back: "Have you thought, instead, of changing your name to Harold Comedy?"
A healthy attitude is contagious but don't wait to catch it from others. Be a carrier.
My intention still is to write a play to commemorate, possibly rather skeptically, the 50th anniversary of the Russian revolution. I started it at the beginning of 1966, but confronted with the enormous importance and reality of that revolution, I absolutely boggle. I don't know what to do about it.
The truth is, we value your company, for want of any other. We have been left so much to our own devices—after a while one welcomes the uncertainty of being left to other people's.
The printed word is no longer as in demand as when I was of the age of pupils or even at the age of the teachers teaching them.
I still believe that if your aim is to change the world, journalism is a more immediate short-term weapon.
When you stir your rice pudding, Septimus, the spoonful of jam spreads itself round making red trails like the picture of a meteor in my astronomical atlas. But if you stir backwards, the jam will not come together again. Indeed, the pudding does not notice and continues to turn pink just as before. Do you think this is odd?
Childhood is Last Chance Gulch for happiness. After that, you know too much.
Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.
Chekhov was capable of casually tossing off deplorable comments in his letters, combined with a very modern anger against anti-Semitism.
Every exit is an entry somewhere else.
Because children grow up, we think a child's purpose is to grow up. But a child's purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn't disdain what lives only for a day. It pours the whole of itself into the each moment. We don't value the lily less for not being made of flint and built to last. Life's bounty is in its flow, later is too late. Where is the song when it's been sung? The dance when it's been danced? It's only we humans who want to own the future, too. We persuade ourselves that the universe is modestly employed in unfolding our destination. We note the haphazard chaos of history by the day, by the hour, but there is something wrong with the picture. Where is the unity, the meaning, of nature's highest creation? Surely those millions of little streams of accident and wilfulness have their correction in the vast underground river which, without a doubt, is carrying us to the place where we're expected! But there is no such place, that's why it's called utopia. The death of a child has no more meaning than the death of armies, of nations. Was the child happy while he lived? That is a proper question, the only question. If we can't arrange our own happiness, it's a conceit beyond vulgarity to arrange the happiness of those who come after us.
I don't act, I don't direct, I don't design.
Rosencrantz: We might as well be dead. Do you think death could possibly be a boat?
Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.
A healthy attitude is contagious but don't wait to catch it from others. Be a carrier.
Every exit is an entry somewhere else.
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.
It's not the voting that's democracy; it's the counting.
It seems pointless to be quoted if one isn't going to be quotable … it's better to be quotable than honest.
Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering; the capacity for self-indulgence changes hands.
Since we cannot hope for order let us withdraw with style from the chaos.
My whole life is waiting for the questions to which I have prepared answers.
For all the compasses in the world, there's only one direction, and time is its only measure.
When someone disagrees with you on a moral point you assume that he is one step behind in his thinking, and he assumes that he has gone one step ahead. But I take both parts, O'Hara, leapfrogging myself along the great moral issues, refuting myself and rebutting the refutation towards a truth that must be the compound of two opposite half-truths. And you never reach it because there is always something more to say.
I agree with everything you say, but I would attack to the death your right to say it.
The House of Lords, an illusion to which I have never been able to subscribe — responsibility without power, the prerogative of the eunuch throughout the ages.
I think... the history of civilization is an attempt to codify, classify and categorize aspects of human nature that hardly lend themselves to that process.
Donner: Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.
There is presumably a calendar date — a moment — when the onus of proof passed from the atheist to the believer, when, quite suddenly, secretly, the noes had it.
It was precisely this notion of infinite series which in the sixth century BC led the Greek philosopher Zeno to conclude that since an arrow shot towards a target first had to cover half the distance, and then half the remainder, and then half the remainder after that, and so on ad infinitum, the result was, as I will now demonstrate, that though an arrow is always approaching its target, it never quite gets there, and Saint Sebastian died of fright.
It’s not the voting that’s democracy, it’s the counting.
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.
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!
Language is a finite instrument crudely applied to an infinity of ideas, and one consequence of the failure to take account of this is that modern philosophy has made itself ridiculous by analysing such statements as, "This is a good bacon sandwich," or, "Bedser had a good wicket."
An essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized.