“The play was a great success, but audience was a dismal failure.”

A pessimist is a man who thinks everybody is as nasty as himself, and hates them for it.

If you take too long in deciding what to do with your life, you’ll find you’ve done it.

Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it.

Independence? That’s middle class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.

I’m an atheist and I thank God for it.

You see things; you say, ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say ‘Why not?

Only in books has mankind known perfect truth, love and beauty.

Choose silence of all virtues, for by it you hear other men’s imperfections, and conceal your own.

You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you have lost something.

Your friends are all the dullest dogs.

Happy is the man who can make a living by his hobby.

Why should we take advice on sex from the pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn’t!

In heaven an angel is no one in particular.

Power does not corrupt men; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power.

Youth is wasted on the young.

We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.

I prefer the films that put their audience to sleep in the theater. Some films have made me doze off in the theater, but the same films have made me stay up at night, wake up thinking about them in the morning, and keep on thinking about them for weeks.

Being onstage is just a feeling that you cannot duplicate anywhere else because the energy that the audience is giving you forces you to give more energy. It’s such an output and exchange of energy. You can’t do that anywhere else.

As an audience member, I like the sound of something that’s been written – I like it to sound written. And then, of course, you can’t do it without the musicians who can play it.

Trying to guess what the (mass) audience wants and then trying to satisfy that is usually a bad recipe for getting something good.

The main thing is to be satisfied with your work yourself. It’s useless to have an audience happy if you are not happy.

I think there are two ways to depict a family. One is what it’s really like, and one is what the audience would like it to be. Between you and me, I think the second one is what I would prefer.

There’s that process of writing it – then you come out of your room into the sunlight, and you now have to complete the circuit and make the connection finally with the audience.

I was born, so that the whole world could be a spectator Of my triumph or my doom.