Edward Bond Quotes (41 Quotes)

You have to learn the language of Hamlet.

The one overall structure in my plays is language.

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

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

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

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.

You have to go to the ultimate situation in drama.

It's wonderful to be able to sit down and write a play.

The truth has got to appear plausible on the stage.

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

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

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.

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

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

The theatre, our theatre, comes from the Greeks.

I think there is no world without theatre.

I'm not interested in an imaginary world.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Auschwitz is a place in which tragedy cannot occur.

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

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

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

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.

Shakespeare has no answers for us at all.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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