Success in life is to maintain this ecstasy, to burn always with this hard gemlike flame.
Now for a handful of guilders I happen to have a private and uncut performance of the rape of the Sabine Women - or rather woman, or rather Alfred -Get your skirt on Alfred!
I extract significance from melodrama, a significance which it does not in fact contain; but occasionally, from out of this matter, there escapes a thin beam of light that, seen at the right angle, ca...
Death is the ultimate negative.
When you write, it's making a certain kind of music in your head. There's a rhythm to it, a pulse, and on the whole, I'm writing to that drum rather than the psychological process.
My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful.
Also by the same author ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD THE REAL INSPECTOR HOUND ENTER A FREE MAN AFTER MAGRITTE JUMPERS TRAVESTIES DIRTY LINEN AND NEW-FOUND-LAND NIGHT AND DAY DOGG’S HAMLET, CA...
Words... They're innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get...
When I was twelve I was obsessed. Everything was sex. Latin was sex. The dictionary fell open at 'meretrix', a harlot. You could feel the mystery coming off the word like musk. 'Meretrix'! This was no...
They had it in for us, didn't they? Right from the beginning. Who'd have thought that we were so important?
It's silly to be depressed by it. I mean one thinks of it like being alive in a box, one keeps forgetting to take into account the fact that one is dead, which should make all the difference, shouldn'...
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 love love. I love having a lover and being one. The insularity of passion. I love it. I love the way it blurs the distinction between everyone who isn't one's lover.
HENRY:Leave me out of it. They don’t count. Maybe Brodie got a raw deal, maybe he didn’t. I don’t know. It doesn’t count. He’s a lout with language. I can’t help somebody who thinks, or thinks he thin...
Guil: …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. Player: Unc...
Give us this day our daily mask.
Eternity is a terrible thought. I mean, where's it going to end?
Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light. Dante reserved a place in his Inferno for those who wilfully live in sadness - sullen in the sweet air, he says. Your 'honour' is all shame and timi...
No one gets up after death-there is no applause-there is only silence and some second-hand clothes, and that's death.
Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaning it.