Playwrights From England

"You can't stay in your corner of the forest waiting for others to come to you. You have to go to them sometimes."

"There are some people who begin the Zoo at the beginning, called WAYIN, and walk as quickly as they can past every cage until they get to the one called WAYOUT, but the nicest people go straight to the animal they love the most, and stay there."

"Hello Rabbit, is that you?" "Let's pretend it isn't", said Rabbit, "and see what happens."

"Isn't it funny How a bear likes honey? Buzz! Buzz! Buzz! I wonder why he does?"

"When I was One, I had just begun. When I was Two, I was nearly new. When I was Three I was hardly me. When I was Four, I was not much more. When I was Five, I was just alive. But now I am Six, I'm as clever as clever, So I think I'll be six now for ever and ever."

"How sweet to be a cloud Floating in the blue."

"Cottleston, cottleston, cottleston pie, A fly can't bird, but a bird can fly. Ask me a riddle and I reply, Cottleston, cottleston, cottleston pie."

""Good morning, Pooh Bear", said Eeyore gloomily. "If it is a good morning", he said. "Which I doubt", said he."

"And how are you?", said Winnie-the-Pooh. (...) "Not very how", he said. "I don't seem to have felt at all how for a long time."

"I found a little beetle, so that beetle was his name, And I called him Alexander and he answered just the same. I put him in a matchbox, and I kept him all the day...And Nanny let my beetle out Yes, Nanny let my beetle out She went and let my beetle out- And beetle ran away.She said she didn't mean it, and I never said she did, She said she wanted matches, and she just took off the lid She said that she was sorry, but it's difficult to catch An excited sort of beetle you've mistaken for a match.She said that she was sorry, and I really mustn't mind As there's lots and lots of beetles which she's certain we could find If we looked about the garden for the holes where beetles hid- And we'd get another matchbox, and write BEETLE on the lid.We went to all the places which a beetle might be near, And we made the sort of noises which a beetle likes to hear, And I saw a kind of something, and I gave a sort of shout: "A beetle-house and Alexander Beetle coming out!"It was Alexander Beetle I'm as certain as can be And he had a sort of look as if he thought it might be ME, And he had a kind of look as if he thought he ought to say: "I'm very, very sorry that I tried to run away."And Nanny's very sorry too, for you know what she did, And she's writing ALEXANDER very blackly on the lid, So Nan and me are friends, because it's difficult to catch An excited Alexander you've mistaken for a match."

"Kanga said to Roo, "Drink up your milk first, dear, and talk afterwards." So Roo, who was drinking his milk, tried to say that he could do both at once . . . and had to be patted on the back and dried for quite a long time afterwards."

""H–hup!" said Roo accidentally. "Roo, dear!" said Kanga reproachfully. "Was it me?" asked Roo, a little surprised."

"Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin."

"Because my spelling is Wobbly. It's good spelling but it Wobbles, and the letters get in the wrong places."

"It is hard to be brave," said Piglet, sniffing slightly, "when you're only a Very Small Animal."

"It was just as if somebody inside him were saying, "Now then, Pooh, time for a little something.""

"These notices had been written by Christopher Robin, who was the only one in the forest who could spell; for Owl, wise though he was in many ways, able to read and write and spell his own name WOL, yet somehow went all to pieces over delicate words like MEASLES and BUTTEREDTOAST."

"I'm giving this to Eeyore," he explained, "as a present. What are you going to give?" "Couldn't I give it too?" said Piglet. "From both of us?" "No," said Pooh. "That would not be a good plan."

"Owl was telling Kanga an Interesting Anecdote full of long words like Encyclopædia and Rhododendron to which Kanga wasn't listening."

"I have been Foolish and Deluded," said he, "and I am a Bear of No Brain at All."

""If there's a buzzing-noise, somebody's making a buzzing-noise, and the only reason for making a buzzing-noise that I know of is because you're a bee." Then he thought another long time, and said: "And the only reason for being a bee that I know of is making honey." And then he got up, and said: "And the only reason for making honey is so I can eat it." So he began to climb the tree."

"Pooh always liked a little something at eleven o'clock in the morning, and he was very glad to see Rabbit getting out the plates and mugs; and when Rabbit said, "Honey or condensed milk with your bread?" he was so excited that he said, "Both," and then, so as not to seem greedy, he added, "But don't bother about the bread, please.""

"It's a little Anxious," he said to himself, "to be a Very Small Animal Entirely Surrounded by Water."

"When we asked Pooh what the opposite of an Introduction was, he said "The what of a what?" which didn't help us as much as we had hoped, but luckily Owl kept his head and told us that the Opposite of an Introduction, my dear Pooh, was a Contradiction; and, as he is very good at long words, I am sure that that's what it is."

""What?" said Piglet, with a jump. And then, to show that he hadn't been frightened, he jumped up and down once or twice more in an exercising sort of way."

"And it is that word 'hummy,' my darlings, that marks the first place in The House at Pooh Corner at which Tonstant Weader fwowed up."

"Tell the innocent visitor from another world that two people were killed at Serajevo, and that the best that Europe could do about it was to kill eleven million more."

"I wrote somewhere once that the third-rate mind was only happy when it was thinking with the majority, the second-rate mind was only happy when it was thinking with the minority, and the first-rate mind was only happy when it was thinking."

"They have almost brought it off, the War to End Peace, for which they have been striving for three years. What an incredible joke! A war 'to defend the freedom of the Straits and the sanctity of our graves in Gallipoli', says Punch magnificently. Of course you can think of it like that, and it sounds quite dignified and natural. But you may also think, as I do, of those five or ten or twenty men, our chosen statesmen, sitting round a table; the same old statesmen; each with his war memories thick upon him; each knowing his own utter incompetence to maintain a war or to end a war."

"They're changing guard at Buckingham Palace — Christopher Robin went down with Alice. They've great big parties inside the grounds. "I wouldn't be king for a hundred pounds", Says Alice."

"James James Morrison Morrison Weatherby George Dupree Took great care of his mother Though he was only three. James James said to his mother Mother he said, said he: You mustn't go down to the end of the town if you don't go down with me. James James Morrison's Mother Put on a golden gown. James James Morrison's Mother Went to the end of the town James James Morrison's Mother Said to herself, said she: I can go right down to the end of the town and be back in time for tea!"

"Halfway down the stairs Is a stair Where I sit. There isn't any Other stair Quite like It. I'm not at the bottom, I'm not at the top; So this is the stair Where I always Stop. Halfway up the stairs Isn't up, Isn't down. It isn't in the nursery, It isn't in the town. And all sorts of funny thoughts Run round my head: "It isn't really Anywhere! It's somewhere else Instead!""

"Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think about it."

"The Herr Doctor does not know about peoples."

"The man who tells the tale if he has a tale worth telling will know exactly what he is about and this business of the artist as a sort of starry-eyed inspired creature, dancing along, with his feet two or three feet above the surface of the earth, not really knowing what sort of prints he's leaving behind him, is nothing like the truth."

"[T]he parody is so much better than anything that W. Somerset Maugham ever wrote himself."

"Franky, it's a fucking farrago."

"[H]ighly ambitious work...continuing power....vast novel...told over eighty-one chapters by an eighty-one-year-old pederast Catholic writer-narrator...summed up the literary, social and moral history of the century with comic richness as well as encyclopedic knowingness."

"Basically I'm an optimist. Intellectually I can see man's balance is about fifty-fifty, and his chances of blowing himself up are about one to one. I can't see this any way but intellectually. I'm just emotionally unable to believe that he will do this. This means that I am by nature an optimist and by intellectual conviction a pessimist, I suppose."

"We know what goes on in the act of love, and those of us who are writers despair of ever finding verbal equivalents for the pain and pleasure of excitation fulfilled in what Rabelais’s translator Urquhart called ‘venerean ecstasy’. A mechanical description of the act tells us nothing, any more than a scientifically accurate account of mastication will convey the flavour of roast duck."

"...can be read as an ‘answer’ to…Mailer’s The White Negro (1957) and other works of that period recommending crime and ... murder as expressions of existential freedom. ...Mailer recommended that whites emulate ... traits that ... were producing ... the black 'underclass'. In A Clockwork Orange, the young thugs are scarcely existential heroes. The surrounding society does not provide the norms which, internalized, allow for civilization. In the underclass foreseen in A Clockwork Orange, Mr Mailer’s sentimental dream has become our own nightmare."

"One cannot condemn a novel of 150 pages for failing to answer some of the most difficult and puzzling questions of human existence, but one can praise it for raising them in a peculiarly profound manner and forcing us to think about them."

"He has never done better than in his opening trilogy about Malaya..."

"An Egyptian priest....plays up the mystery of language to enhance his own power."

"The theme is an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature. The moral is that the shape of a society must depend on the ethical nature of the individual and not on any political system however apparently logical or respectable. The whole book is symbolic in nature except the rescue in the end where adult life appears, dignified and capable, but in reality enmeshed in the same evil as the symbolic life of the children on the island. The officer, having interrupted a man-hunt, prepares to take the children off the island in a cruiser which will presently be hunting its enemy in the same implacable way. And who will rescue the adult and his cruiser?"

"[D]elightful, comic, linguistically playful...an opening step in the extraordinarily rich, inventive and experimental career that was to come."

"[T]he post-Joycean artist as lecher-poet, obsessed with death, language and his own insides."

"In Lady Chatterley’s Lover we meet the ancient honest word fuck. Lawrence believed that it could be cleansed of its centuries of accumulated filth and stalk nakedly through his pages like Connie and Mellors themselves, standing for an act of love which had been too long swaddled in euphemisms. There are many people who cherish the fallacy of a golden age of Anglo-Saxon candour in which lovers invited each other to fuck or be fucked….This was never so. The word has always been taboo. You will find no Anglo-Saxon document which contains it. True, it is old, cognate with the German ficken, but it stands for a brutal act unsuitable for the marriage bed. It connotes impersonality and aggression. When Dr Johnson said that drinking and fucking were the only things worth doing…he was referring to getting drunk and going to brothels. A man can fuck a whore but, unless his wife is a whore, he cannot fuck his wife….fuck is a…dysphemism….there is no love in it. Lawrence made an aesthetic rather than a moral gaffe…."

"What...remains of Burgess's colossal output? The canon...is limited....at its heart, we find just a handful of books: the Malayan Trilogy, the Enderby novels, A Clockwork Orange, and Earthly Powers. These are lasting and significant. The career, on the other hand, is not inspiring, poisoned by paranoia, bombast and an accumulation of lies so corrosive that the...life...comes down as something rusty and sadly disposable."

"Anthony Burgess’s gusto and exuberance springs from his brilliant bum."