“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.

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

Maybe a first love exists to reaffirm the best parts of yourself, the choices you made when you didn’t worry about the consequences.

The table is where the big decisions of the family are made and all the arguing takes place.

This may well have made it more rather than less democratic than many countries today .

It made me want to change the kinds of poems I was writing, but I’m terrible at writing overtly political poems.

History is made every day.

It made me feel very old, really, because it wasn’t eccentric for its own sake, it was just very original.

I’ve never made a video where I didn’t talk to the artist before I wrote the treatment.

To try to teach ignoring technology is to ignore the progress that we have made over the last century.