I was born in Liverpool in England, and I lived there for the first nine years of my life.

I really believe that studying organization, even in the form of studying detective story organization, is very, very valuable for a playwright, a budding playwright.

Black Comedy is a farce that is played in the dark, as you know, with the lights full on. It's the Chinese convention of reversing light and dark, and exactly where anybody is at any given moment is the play.

It's an extraordinary thing about Mozart is that you never tire of him... he never bores me, and he doesn't... not only bore me, that's too strong a word.

I was born in Liverpool in England, and I lived there for the first nine years of my life.

Passion, you see, can be destroyed by a doctor. It cannot be created.

We... our war began September the 3rd 1939, with the invasion of Poland by Germany, and thereafter the great state of danger in England at that time, with the bombings, necessitated the evacuation of children.

Librarians as a race tend to be tedious.

I think people nowadays do tend to blame their parents for everything.

It is very, very difficult for a playwright to write a scene in which a young man has his first deep experience of sex with a girl whom he found immensely attractive, is fully satisfied by this event and gets up and blinds a lot of horses.

They look so expectant, and then they look so depressed... that was the other great lesson that The Royal Hunt of the Sun taught me, it was the profundity that masked drama can achieve, that of course, the audience were not seeing masks moving at all.

But the first published thing I did was a detective story, detective novel, and I did that on my own.

You can't always let people do their own thing.

Rehearsing a play is making the word flesh. Publishing a play is reversing the process.

I think plays, like books, are endemic. They grow out of the soil of the writer and the place he's writing about. I think, you just can't move them about, you know.

If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting.

And in fact, I think one of the best guides to telling you who you are, and I think children use it all the time for this purpose, is fantasy.

I made, over the years in Cambridge, several very good American friends, and America appeared to me, a land of promise in every sense of that word, a land of freedom from the inhibitions and restrictions that I felt in England.

I think I did have fantasies about being an actor. In fact, I know I did.

You never quite know what's going to strike your imagination, or something that won't going to leave you alone, not going to leave alone, and this was one for me.

Tragedy, for me, is not a conflict between right and wrong, but between two different kinds of right.

Everything we feel is made of Time. All the beauties of life are shaped by it.

I think possibly the first film that has music as its leading character.

My actual childhood, as opposed to my adolescence, was not spent in London.

Watching Italian opera, all those male sopranos screeching, stupid fat couples rolling their eyes about. That's not love, it's just rubbish.

I was an accomplice in my own frustration.

Art and literature are my surrogate religions.

I discover what I mean as I write. That can be both terrifically exciting and very dangerous, because when you look at your words later, you wonder, 'Did I really mean that, or am I just making verbal patterns?'

In London, 'Equus' caused a sensation because it displayed cruelty to horses; in New York, because it allegedly displayed cruelty to psychiatrists.

Our function as playwrights to some extent is to make audiences see with their ears, because films make us see with our eyes much better.

The conquistadors and their followers were very rough people, and they were fixated on gold and silver. They were oblivious to the astonishing achievements of the Inca civilisation.

The rhetoric is the key to the character. It's the verbal music of the piece.

Things rust, you know, like the heart. My cardiologist said, 'It's a pump; use it - that's the sole advice I've got to give you.' It's the same in playwriting. Don't theorise about it. Do it.

The trouble is if you don't spend your life yourself, other people spend it for you.

I was born in Liverpool in England, and I lived there for the first nine years of my life.

It will be quite satisfactory if you open them gradually, as the circumstances may require; but the President assures you that this will not be the case if you make a treaty with England first.

If you make a treaty first with the United States and settle the matter of the opium trade, England cannot change this, though she should desire to do so.

When I was at Stratford, the very first thing that I was commissioned to work on was trying to make a musical out of the documentary material about the General Strike, which was the next big historical event in England, after the First World War.

Furthermore, the spirit of enterprise which had its first intellectual development in England has especially flourished here as well as throughout all of Canada, while the same spirit has become less virile in the land of its origin.

They say that the commons of England would first destroy the king's friends and afterward himself, and then bring the Duke of York to be king so that by their false means and lies they may make him to hate and destroy his friends, and cherish his false traitors.

I discovered freedom for the first time in England.

The first organised opposition by women to women's suffrage in England dates from 1889, when a number of ladies led by Mrs Ward appealed against the proposed extension of the Parliamentary suffrage to women.

My first crush was Hayley Mills when I was a little kid in England. I used to kiss her picture goodnight.

I love England. It's no coincidence it's the first place I moved to for a more cosmopolitan life, which is the only thing Iceland lacks.

I finished my studies in England, I opened my studio in London, and the first one-man exhibit I had on Bond Street, which was opened by the Austrian ambassador.

I was born in London, England, in 1938, a few months before the war, and spent the first years of my life there, although I was evacuated a couple of times for short periods. My schooling was very interrupted, both by frequent moves and by ill health.

Roosevelt's magic lay in one facet of his personality: He knew how to take the risk. No other man in public life I knew could so readily take the challenge of the new.

Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. Because it's only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.