Religion enabled society to organise itself to debate goodness, just as Greek drama had once done.
Art is the close scrutiny of reality and therefore I put on the stage only those things that I know happen in our society.
The English sent all their bores abroad, and acquired the Empire as a punishment.
At the turn of the century theatre does not have to be prescriptive.
Auschwitz is a place in which tragedy cannot occur.
But we are not in the world to be good but to change it.
Fifteen years ago I walked out of a production of one of my plays at the RSC because I decided it was a waste of time.
First there was the theatre of people and animals, then of people and the devil. Now we need the theatre of people and people.
Humanity's become a product and when humanity is a product, you get Auschwitz and you get Chair.
I think there is no world without theatre.
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 interested in the real world.
If you engage people on a vital, important level, they will respond.
In the end I think theatre has only one subject justice.
It seems to me that we are profoundly ignorant of ourselves.
I'm not interested in an imaginary world.
In the past goodness was always a collective experience. Then goodness became privatised.
It's insulting to ask a dramatist what his view of his play is. I have no opinion.
It's wonderful to be able to sit down and write a play.
Our unconscious is not more animal than our conscious, it is often even more human.
Shakespeare has no answers for us at all.
The Greeks said very, very extreme things in their tragedies.
The one overall structure in my plays is language.
The theatre, our theatre, comes from the Greeks.
The truth has got to appear plausible on the stage.
Violence is never a solution in my plays, just as ultimately violence is never a solution in human affairs.
We are still living in the aftershock of Hiroshima, people are still the scars of history.
