“There are very few people on top of life, and the rest of us don’t like them very much.”

What is considered sane in writers is made for the rest of the human race.

The darker the subject, the more light you must try to shed on the matter. And vice versa.

Few women care to be laughed at and men not at all, except for large sums of money.

There is a school of thought that believes that sleep is for the night. You appear to be out to disprove them.

Whatever devices you use should always be there to serve the theme. If the theme has been overtaken by the device, then something’s wrong.

You don’t have to bother with men, they believe any compliment automatically.

Cats names are more for human benefit. They give one a certain degree more confidence that the animal belongs to you.

I think of a plot, I think of an idea, and then I wonder, How can I get that onto the stage?.

So as not to disturb me in my little nook behind the biography shelves.

Custard pie humour is fairly universal, but at the other end, which I’m more interested in, there’s the humour that hovers on the darkness, that walks in the shadow of something else, not always that obvious.

Plays by Alan Ayckbourn have been attracting larger audiences in the regional theatres than those of Shakespeare.

A gentleman … sleeps at his work. That’s what work’s for. Why do you think they have the SILENCE notices in the library?

What I find interesting is how close you can run the laughter along the seam of seriousness, and occasionally cross it, so that half the house genuinely doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

As a writer one is allowed to have conversations with oneself.

He really is terribly heavy going. Like running up hill in roller skates.

Salad, I can’t bear salad. It grows while you’re eating it, you know.

That was a good fight back in the gym, he said. But i think you could benefit from a few more boxing lessons.

I’ve survived quite a few generations. That’s because I never lost my enthusiasm. I wake up every morning like on Christmas Day, waiting for the gifts.

One of the few blessings of living in an age of anxiety is that we are forced to become aware of ourselves.

We believe in saying no to thousands of projects so that we can really focus on the few that are truly important and meaningful to us.

“I’m fine. I just…I don’t want to go in just yet. I just want to sit and not have to think about…I just…want to be a man who has been to a concert with a girl in a red dress. Just for a few minutes more.

When an American family becomes separated from its toothbrushes and combs and pajamas for a few hours it considers that it has had quite an adventure.

We are all civilized people, wich means that we are all savages at heart but observing a few amenities of civilized behaviour.

Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable.