“What I’m above all primarily concerned with is the substance of life, the pith of reality.”

I had no idea of who could play it, no notion really. Then Richard came to see us but I don’t think it was decided at that meeting.

History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history? History is women following behind with the bucket.

Standards are always out of date. That’s what makes them standards.

To play Trivial Pursuit with a life like mine could be said to be a form of homeopathy.

No mention of God. They keep Him up their sleeves for as long as they can, vicars do. They know it puts people off.

I’m not “happy” but I’m not unhappy about it.

I turned down a knighthood. It would be like having to wear a suit every day of your life.

I’m not good at precise, coherent argument. But plays are suited to incoherent argument, put into the mouths of fallible people.

At the drabber moments of my life (swilling some excrement from the steps, for instance, or rooting with a bent coat-hanger down a blocked sink) thoughts occur like.

Because you should realise the Cenotaph and the Last Post and all that stuff is concerned, there’s no better way of forgetting something than by commemorating it.

Life is like a box of sardines and we are all looking for the key.

Were we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?

It’s like going to a place that you’ve never been to before – you’ve got a picture of it and then you go there and that picture is totally wiped out by the reality.

You go to a book to have your convictions corroborated.

The majority of people perform well in a crisis and when the spotlight is on them; it’s on the Sunday afternoons of this life, when nobody is looking, that the spirit falters.

You have the knowledge but that does not entitle you to be superior. Knowledge makes you the servant not the master.

Literature deserves its prestige for one reason above all others – because it’s a tool to help us live and die with a little bit more wisdom, goodness, and sanity.

Happiness is impossible for longer than 15 minutes. We are the descendants of creatures who, above all else, worried.

It certainly is gravy every day above ground right now, after kicking that heroin habit.

In [The New Poetry] I had attacked the British poets’ nervous preference for gentility above all else, and their avoidance of the uncomfortable, destructive truths both of the inner life and of the present time.

To experience poetry is to see over and above reality. It is to discover that which is beyond the physical, to experience another life and another level of feeling.

The more his character, by rising above material contingencies, widen, become free and independent.

When diving to attack always leave a proportion of your formation above to act as top guard.

Thanks be to God, not–only for ‘rivers of endless joys above, but for ‘rills of comfort here below.’