 At the turn of the century theatre does not have to be prescriptive. |
| Whatever the economy needs to maintain itself, the government will do it. |
| You have to learn the language of Hamlet. |
| If you engage people on a vital, important level, they will respond. |
| Violence is never a solution in my plays, just as ultimately violence is never a solution in human affairs. |
| When humanness is lost the radical difference between the bodies in the pit and people walking on the street is lost. |
| I write plays not to make money, but to stop myself from going mad. Because it's my way of making the world rational to me. |
| I'm not interested in an imaginary world. |
| It seems to me that we are profoundly ignorant of ourselves. |
| All you now do is pursue your private objectives within society. Instead of us being a community, everybody is asked to seek their own personal ends. It's called competition. And competition is antagonism. |
| The human mind is a dramatic structure in itself and our society is absolutely saturated with drama. |
| What I try to do in a play is put a problem on stage, head-on, without evasion. |
| It's wonderful to be able to sit down and write a play. |
| It's politely assumed that democracy is a means of containing and restraining violence. But violence comes not from genes but from ideas. |
| The one overall structure in my plays is language. |
| First there was the theatre of people and animals, then of people and the devil. Now we need the theatre of people and people. |
| What Shakespeare and the Greeks were able to do was radically question what it meant to be a human being. |
| Religion enabled society to organise itself to debate goodness, just as Greek drama had once done. |
| In the past goodness was always a collective experience. Then goodness became privatised. |
| Auschwitz is a place in which tragedy cannot occur. |
