“At male strip shows, it is still the women that we watch, the audience of women and their eager faces. They are more obscene than if they were dancing naked themselves.”

The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced. The hyper real.

There is nothing more mysterious than a TV set left on in an empty room.

Never resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which, after having abused it for so long, you are stupefied by its innocence.

The great person is ahead of their time, the smart make something out of it, and the blockhead, sets themselves against it.

To love someone is to isolate him from the world, wipe out every trace of him, dispossess him of his shadow, drag him into a murderous future. It is to circle around the other like a dead star and absorb him into a black light.

The abjection of our political situation is the only true challenge today.

It is always the same: once you are liberated, you are forced to ask who you are.

Santa Barbara is a paradise; Disneyland is a paradise; the U.S. is a paradise. Paradise is just paradise. Mournful, monotonous, and superficial though it may be, it is paradise. There is no other.

Only facing up to this situation in all its desperation can help us get out of it.

We shall never resolve the enigma of the relation between the negative foundations of greatness and that greatness itself.

You are born modern, you do not become so.

I hesitate to deposit money in a bank. I am afraid I shall never dare to take it out again.

It is even stranger than a man talking to himself or a woman standing dreaming at her stove. It is as if another planet is communicating with you.

Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia.

The world is not dialectical – it is sworn to extremes, not to equilibrium, sworn to radical antagonism, not to reconciliation or synthesis. This is also the principle of evil.

The order of the world is always right – such is the judgment of God. For God has departed, but he has left his judgment behind, the way the Cheshire Cat left his grin.

My son says I never tell stories about anyone who’s living.

I expect them to have read books – there are a lot of people like that! That’s my audience.

I think one of the big things about comedy is the ability for the audience to identify.

When I talk to audiences about the size and age of the cosmos, people often say, “It makes me feel so insignificant.” I answer, “The bigger and more impersonal the universe is, the more meaningful you are, because this vast.

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

I don’t think it does the audience any good to know what I do to prepare.

Only two to three per cent of an audience is interested in words and pays attention to lyrics.

When you perform with a live audience, the audience comes back to you.