Playwrights From England

"Journalists say a thing that they know isn't true, in the hope that if they keep on saying it long enough it will be true."

"A cause may be inconvenient, but it's magnificent. It's like champagne or high heels, and one must be prepared to suffer for it."

"Yes books are valuable. But not reading of books will take the place of a daily, candid, honest examination of what one has recently done, and what one is about to do - of a steady looking at one's self in the face (disconcerting though the sight may be)."

"The price of justice is eternal publicity."

"Young women especially have something invested in being nice people, and it's only when you have children that you realise you’re not a nice person at all, but generally a selfish bully."

"Some people carry their hearts in their heads; very many carry their heads in their hearts. The difficulty is to keep them apart, and yet both actively working together."

"A prig is a pompous fool who has gone out for a ceremonial walk, and without knowing it has lost an important part of his attire, namely, his sense of humour."

"Widows tend either to fade away when husbands die, committing emotional suttee, or else find that a new life burgeons. Here in Christchurch, a lot of burgeoning goes on."

"Does there, I wonder, exist a being who has read all, or approximately all, that the person of average culture is supposed to have read, and that not to have read is a social sin? If such a being does exist, surely he is an old, a very old man."

"There are very few people on top of life, and the rest of us don't like them very much."

"Few women care to be laughed at and men not at all, except for large sums of money."

"A comedy is just a tragedy interrupted, I once said. Do you finish with the kiss or when she opens her eyes to tell him she loves him and sees blonde hairs on his collar?"

"The darker the subject, the more light you must try to shed on the matter. And vice versa."

"They've started this filthy floodlit cricket with cricketers wearing tin hats and advertisements for contraceptives on their boots."

"Plays by Alan Ayckbourn have been attracting larger audiences in the regional theatres than those of Shakespeare."

"I disagree with Les. We always found good cunt at the Lyceum. Friendly cunt, clean cunt, spare cunt, jeans and knicker stuffed full of nice juicy hairy cunt, handfuls of cunt, palmful grabbing the cunt by the stem, or the root – infantile memories of cunt – backrow slides – slithery oily cunt, the cunt that breathes – the cunt that’s neatly wrapped in cotton, in silk, in nylon, that announces, that speaks or thrusts, that winks that’s squeezed in a triangle of furtive cloth backed by an arse that’s creamy, springy billowy cushiony tight, knicker lined, knicker skinned, circumscribed by flowers and cotton, by views, clinging knicker, juice ridden knicker, hot knicker, wet knicker, swelling vulva knicker, witty cunt, teeth smiling the eyes biting cunt, cultured cunt, culture vulture cunt, finger biting cunt, cunt that pours, cunt that spreads itself over your soft lips, that attacks, cunt that imagines – cunt you dream about, cunt you create as a Melba, a meringue with smooth sides – remembered from school boys’ smelly first cunt, first foreign cunt, amazing cunt – cunt that’s cruel. Cunt that protects itself and makes you want it even more cunt – cunt that smells of the air, of the earth, of bakeries, of old apples, of figs, of sweat of hands of sour yeast of fresh fish cunt. So – are we going Les? We might pick up a bit of crumpet."

"Ah, Chloris! could I now but sit As unconcern'd as when Your infant beauty could beget No happiness or pain! When I the dawn used to admire, And praised the coming day, I little thought the rising fire Would take my rest away."

"Why then should I seek further store, And still make love anew? When change itself can give no more, 'Tis easy to be true."

"Foote," (said lord Sandwich) "I have often wondered what catastrophe would bring you to your end; but I think, that you must either die of the p-x, or the halter." "My lord," (replied Foote instantaneously) "that will depend upon one of two contingencies; — whether I embrace your lordship's mistress, or your lordship's principles."

"He made him a hut, wherein he did put The carcass of Robinson Crusoe. O poor Robinson Crusoe!"

"Play me no plays."

"Born in a cellar, and living in a garret."

"As I am never better than when I am mad; then methinks I am a brave fellow; then I do wonders: but reason abuseth me, and there's the torment, there's the hell."

"Lor’, but women’s rum cattle to deal with, the first man found that to his cost, And I reckon it’s just through a woman the last man on earth’ll be lost."

"It ’s no matter what you do If your heart be only true, And his heart was true to Poll."

"Duly twice a morning Would I be sprinkling it with fountain-water. At last it grew, and grew, and bore, and bore, Till at the length It grew a gallows, and did bear our son, It bore thy fruit and mine: O wicked, wicked plant."

"Dost thou think to live till his old doublet will make thee a new truss?"

"For what's a play without a woman in it?"

"My son – and what's a son? A thing begot Within a pair of minutes, thereabout: A lump bred up in darkness."

"Where words prevail not, violence prevails; But gold doth more than either of them both."

"What outcries pluck me from my naked bed And chill my throbbing heart with trembling fear."

"Oh eyes, no eyes, but fountains fraught with tears; Oh life, no life, but lively form of death; Oh world, no world, but mass of public wrongs, Confused and filled with murder and misdeeds."

"In time the savage bull sustains the yoke, In time all haggard hawks will stoop to lure, In time small wedges cleave the hardest oak, In time the flint is pierced with softest shower."

"Thus must we toil in other men's extremes, That know not how to remedy our own."

"So Tom was left alone again, this time for quite a spell. The place had filled up now and he was gradually pushed back from the bar counter until he found himself closely ringed round by men and girls, nearly all talking hard. They were wildly different in appearance, ranging from the slovenly to the excessively smart, but they were all alike, it seemed to him as he listened to them, in being on the edge of things. They were nearly doing a television series, almost about to have a play done at the Arts, just missing a commission to photograph Sicily for a coffee-table book, possibly writing two songs for a new musical, being asked to try again for that super modelling job. And while they might be all on their way towards ultimate disillusion and misery, just now they were gay and excited, full of enthusiasm for themselves, their work, their enchanting style of life. Tom had met a few men and women of great and widely-recognised talent, large personalities a long way from these edges, people bang in the centre, and they had displayed little or none of this enthusiasm, often seeming dubious, disenchanted, melancholy, weighed down by the sense of responsibility a great talent and reputation bring. But these types, with fuzzy little talents at best and with only the faintest glimmer of reputation, were still enchanted - at least at this hour with drinks in their hands. And not for the first time, Tom wondered about the drinks, which demanded a constant passing of pound notes. Nobody he had overheard so far appeared to have earned any money recently, yet here they were buying double gins and whiskies."

"Then, above all, the English people have a curious sense of humour, rather than wit. Humour comes from the heart; wit comes from the brain. We can laugh at ourselves. ... Well, laughter is one of the best things that God has given us, and with hearty laughter neither malice nor indecency can exist. And of all men who have shown us what that laughter can mean, none was like Dickens, every one of whose characters is English to the marrow; and if I might mention a living writer, I think the truest Englishmen are found in Mr. Priestley's novels."

"Priestley became in the months after Dunkirk a leader second only in importance to Mr. Churchill. And he gave us what our other leaders have always failed to give us – an ideology."

"I am not an atheist, but I cannot agree with men who talk about God as if He had once attended a Speech Day at their theological college."

"Science can function only by abstracting from the reality in which the scientist has his being. In spite of the astonishing complications it discovers, with which it dazzles and almost blinds us, science is compelled by its own terms of reference to be a drastic simplification."

"[A] man must be either conscientiously scientific in his approach or frankly speculative. What he must not do is present his speculative untested ideas in a manner and style of dogmatic certainty that they are not entitled to claim. This is being pseudo-scientific."

"Priestley's broadcasts are excellent. I am astonished that the BBC allow them. He says insistently that this war is not to restore the old order, that we must not return to the old muddle and injustices. It is in our order to commence a period of reconstruction and new activity, so exciting and absorbing that Hitler and his Nazis will be forgotten in a few years. Already, he says, he has had letters telling him to get off the air before the government puts him where he belongs."

"Because most children are highly imaginative, it is supposed by some that to reach maturity we ought to leave imagination behind, like the habit of smearing our faces with jam or chocolate. But an adult in whom imagination has withered is mentally lame and lopsided, in danger of turning into a zombie or a murderer. It is the creative imagination that has given our ruthless bloodthirsty species its occasional gleams of nobility, its hope of rising above the muck it spreads."

"The very newspapers that celebrate the latest conquest in their largest print also keep asking us what is the matter with Woman nowadays, when she has so much she never had before. The answer is that she is tired of having to live with neurotic, immature conquerors."

"[I]f self-deception has to be risked anyhow, it might be better to risk it to take a broad view than a narrow view. It may be foolish, perhaps even dangerous, to wander too far from the highway and then be the dupe of fantasies; but it may be even more foolish, even more dangerous in the end, to be so determined to keep to the well-tested road that you wear blinkers, see nothing of the surrounding landscape, and find the road itself, all that you can see, more and more wearisome and detestable."

"It is, of course, men who are more likely to inhibit themselves for the sake of appearing to be sensible and dependable.[…] If pressed, I will agree that more women than men wish to appear wonderfully sensitive and intuitive, and may stop being realistic […] in order to deceive themselves and other people. On the other hand, women in general tend to be more realistic and yet in certain matters more open-minded than men, more ready to resist that pressure of opinion. They are less likely to be put into blinkers by ideas. Moreover […] as a rule the average woman notices far more than the average man; she has a better eye for detail than he has; she makes a more alert witness."

"Conquest is all. having conquered land and sea, we are now conquering space, more and more of it. As soon as we have conquered the moon, we must make plans to conquer the planets. I am not denying that there is in all this a fine mixed element of enterprise, ingenuity and adventure. But the repeated use of these terms conquer and conquest is worth noting. It offers us a picture of modern humanity as a restless and ruthless immature male. He is restless and ruthless because the relation between the conqueror and the conquered is rarely satisfying. The conqueror has to push on because he soon finds his victories hollow and disappointing. Nature, nothing if not feminine, seems to take a sly pleasure in outwitting her conquerors."

"We tend quite rightly to associate an age with its newest and most original ideas, and there is no harm in this as long as we remember that only a few men, at that time, may have actually held those ideas, and that many decades, often amounting to centuries, may pass before those ideas have seeped down to wider and commoner levels of belief, thought, and feeling. So many 'hard-headed and realistic' men of today repeat what scientists were saying 100 years ago, and may know nothing about the outlook and prevailing moods of scientists today. And men in the street now assert beliefs originally found among the intellectuals of the 18th century. We may expect time-lags of various lengths."

"I have pointed out already how ideas seep down to wider and commoner levels of intelligence and feeling until at last they are believed to be solid realities. It is precisely the 'hard-headed and realistic' who all too often exist in cages made out of largely discredited hypotheses. They serve prison sentences behind walls and doors they only imagine are there."

"During the war after the 9 o'clock news on Sundays there was Postscripts, a short talk on a topical subject, often by J. B. Priestley, who had a unique gift of cloaking left-wing views as solid, down to earth, Northern homespun philosophy."

"In our secret depths, wherever we do our unspoken wishing, either we want life to be tidy, clear, fully understood, contained within definite limits, or we long for it to seem larger, wilder, stranger. Faced with some odd incident, either we wish to cut it down or to build it up. On this level, below that of philosophies and rational opinions, either we reject or ignore the unknown, the apparently inexplicable, the marvellous and miraculous, or we welcome every sign of them. At one extreme is a narrow intolerant bigotry, snarling at anything outside the accepted world-picture, and at the other is an idiotic credulity, the prey of any glib charlatan. At one end the world becomes a prison, at the other a madhouse."