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

If you are flattering a woman, it pays to be a little more subtle.

A comedy is just a tragedy interrupted, I once said. Do you finish with the kiss or when she opens her eyes to tell him she loves him and sees blonde hairs on his collar?

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?.

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.

You had disco going on behind punk. You had Michael Jackson. You had the Sex Pistols.

If you are living for tomorrow, you will always be one day behind.

Experts tell us that 90% of all brain development occurs by the age of five. If we don’t begin thinking about education in the early years, our children are at risk of falling behind by the time they start Kindergarten.

Crazy Horse dreamed and went into the world where there is nothing but the spirits of things. That is the real world that is behind this one, and everything we see here is something like a shadow from that world….

Live so that when the final summons comes you will leave something more behind you than an epitaph on a tombstone or an obituary in a newspaper.

When we are confronted by failure and mistakes, we can leave them behind and go on with our lives.

Fashion: a barricade behind which men hide their nothingness.

Satire is, more than those he brands, to blame; He hides behind a magisterial air He own offences, and strips others’ bare.