But we are not in the world to be good but to change it.

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.

We may seem competent, but by the end of next century there will be new deserts, new ruins.

You have to go to the ultimate situation in drama.

But we are not in the world to be good but to change it.

I think there is no world without theatre.

What Shakespeare and the Greeks were able to do was radically question what it meant to be a human being.

If you engage people on a vital, important level, they will respond.

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.

At the turn of the century theatre does not have to be prescriptive.

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.

In the past goodness was always a collective experience. Then goodness became privatised.

Whatever the economy needs to maintain itself, the government will do it.

Violence is never a solution in my plays, just as ultimately violence is never a solution in human affairs.

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 Greeks said very, very extreme things in their tragedies.

It's insulting to ask a dramatist what his view of his play is. I have no opinion.

I don't think it's the job of theatre at the moment to provide political propaganda; that would be simplistic. We have to explore our situation further before we will understand it.

Auschwitz is a place in which tragedy cannot occur.

Shakespeare has no answers for us at all.

The theatre, our theatre, comes from the Greeks.

It seems to me that we are profoundly ignorant of ourselves.

In the end I think theatre has only one subject: justice.

The human mind is a dramatic structure in itself and our society is absolutely saturated with drama.

The truth has got to appear plausible on the stage.

Now, drama is quite useful at helping us to understand what our position is and, conversely, we might then understand why our theatre is being destroyed.

The English sent all their bores abroad, and acquired the Empire as a punishment.

You have to learn the language of Hamlet.

I'm interested in the real world.

First there was the theatre of people and animals, then of people and the devil. Now we need the theatre of people and people.

We are still living in the aftershock of Hiroshima, people are still the scars of history.

The one overall structure in my plays is language.

It's politely assumed that democracy is a means of containing and restraining violence. But violence comes not from genes but from ideas.

Violence is hidden within democratic structures because they are not radically democratic - Western democracy is merely a domestic convenience of consumerism.

Humanity's become a product and when humanity is a product, you get Auschwitz and you get Chair.

I'm not interested in an imaginary world.

What I try to do in a play is put a problem on stage, head-on, without evasion.

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.

Religion enabled society to organise itself to debate goodness, just as Greek drama had once done.

When humanness is lost the radical difference between the bodies in the pit and people walking on the street is lost.

Our lives are awkward and fragile and we have only one thing to keep us sane: pity, and the man without pity is mad.

I write about violence as naturally as Jane Austen wrote about manners. Violence shapes and obsesses our society, and if we do not stop being violent we have no future.

We used to think that revolutions are the cause of change. Actually it is the other way around: change prepares the ground for revolution.

I must stress here the point that I appreciate clarity, order, meaning, structure, rationality: they are necessary to whatever provisional stability we have, and they can be the agents of gradual and successful change.

Excuses change nothing, but make everyone feel better.

So, first you have to be able to play with a metronome. Then you take your freedom. If you play in an orchestra, you got to watch the conductor, he is like a metronome, but it is more difficult because he can change rhythms.

I wouldn't change Buffy for anything and I wouldn't change the course in which she has evolved but it is nice to be able to do something that is a little different.

For example, UNICEF works with governments to change legislation such as in India where a law was passed raising the age of compulsory school completion to keep children in school and away from the workplace for longer.