Art is the close scrutiny of reality and therefore I put on the stage only those things that I know happen in our society..

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 destro….

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.….

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..

Law and order is one of the steps taken to maintain injustice..

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

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

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

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

Our unconscious is not more animal than our conscious, it is often even more human.

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….

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

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

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

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

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

Art is the expression of the conviction that we can have a rational relationship with the world and each other. It isn't the faith or hope that we ca….

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

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

The Greeks said very, very extreme things in their tragedies..

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 furth….