It's the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.

For all the compasses in the world, there's only one direction, and time is its only measure.

Audiences know what to expect, and that is all that they are prepared to believe in.

Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.

Each move is dictated by the previous one--that is the meaning of order

All your life you live so close to truth, it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye, and when something nudges it into outline it is like being ambushed by a grotesque.

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.

[James] Joyce... an essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized....

He says his aim is poetry. One does not aim at poetry with pistols. At poets, perhaps.

You can't treat royalty like people with normal perverted desires.

Septimus. When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be all alone, on an empty shore. Thomasina. Then we will dance. Is this a waltz?

Uncertainty is the normal state.

Success in life is to maintain this ecstasy, to burn always with this hard gemlike flame.

I've lost all capacity for disbelief. I'm not sure that I could even rise to a little gentle scepticism.

If an idea's worth having once, it's worth having twice.

I will take his secret to the grave, telling people I meet on the way.

Seduced her? Every time I turned round she was up a library ladder. In the end I gave in. That reminds me—I spotted something between her legs that made me think of you.

Your opinions are your symptoms.

Hotel rooms inhabit a separate moral universe.

Well, we'll know better next time.

A healthy attitude is contagious but don't wait to catch it from others. Be a carrier.

Death followed by eternity the worst of both worlds. It is a terrible thought.

Fantasy flows in where fact leaves a vacuum.

Happiness is equilibrium. Shift your weight.

Let me get it straight. Your father was king. You were his only son. Your father dies. You are of age. Your uncle becomes king." "Yes." "Unorthodox.

I should have the courage of my lack of convictions.

The universe is deterministic all right, just like Newton said, I mean it's trying to be, but the only thing going wrong is people fancying people who aren't supposed to be in that part of the plan.

We keep to our usual stuff, more or less, only inside out. We do on stage the things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit being an entrance somewhere else.

I write plays because dialogue is the most respectable way of contradicting myself.

VALENTINE: Are you talking about Lord Byron, the poet? BERNARD: No, you fucking idiot, we're talking about Lord Byron, the chartered accountant.

I would join Sisyphus in Hades and gladly push my boulder up the slope if only, each time it rolled back down, I were given a line of Aeschylus.

Player: Relax. Respond. That's what people do. You can't go through life question your sitution at every turn.

He's never known anything like it! But then, he has never known anything to write home about, so this is nothing to write home about.

Nowadays, an artist is someone who makes art mean the things he does.

We drift down time, clutching at straws. But what good's a brick to a drowning man?

Carnal embrace is the practice of throwing one's arms around a side of beef.

GUIL: A scientific approach to the examination of phenomena is a defence against the pure emotion of fear

Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light.

You think human nature is a beast, that it must be put in a cage. But it's the cage that makes the animal bad.

ROS: Why don't you go and have a look? GUIL: Pragmatism?! - is that all you have to offer?

We're better at predicting events at the edge of the galaxy or inside the nucleus of an atom than whether it'll rain on auntie's garden party three Sundays from now.

(Words) deserve respect. Get the right ones in the right order, and you can nudge the world a little.

If you want to change something by Tuesday, theater is no good. Journalism is what does that. But, if you want to just alter the chemistry of the moral matrix, then theater has a longer half-life.

...and for the last three minutes on the wind of a windless day I have heard the sound of drums and flute...

It is better to be quotable than to be honest.

The natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster. strangely enough it all works out in the end... it's a mystery.

The bad end unhappily; the good, unluckily. That is what tragedy means.

THOMASINA: But then the Egyptian noodle made carnal embrace with the enemy who burned the great library of Alexandria without so much as a fine for all that is overdue!

Traitors hoist by their own petard?--or victims of the gods?--we shall never know!

Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering.