Quotes

I've often wondered, because of my frequent sojourns in America, how much good psychiatry and all the rest of it was doing those of my acquaintances who were in treatment. I know a couple who appear to have benefited from it, but most, whatever they may think, haven't changed at all. I began to wonder some time ago whether it might not be a false religion with a lot of worshipers.

When you first do a play, the actors tend to eye you ingratiatingly, with a kind of respectful hope, as if you are the repository of some great secret which they must have. Three weeks later, these roles are reversed. It is you, the author, who is sidling up to them nervously and saying in a low voice "I wonder if you'd mind putting in this line, or saying this to her". And quite often the erstwhile timid star is staring at you and saying "Oh no. he would never say that!" Being a playwright in rehearsal involves a necessary if saddening process of being gutted and then discarded. You are first welcomed and then shown the door.

I think think some of the reasons I've had a sense of happiness in my life, a sense of fulfillment, is that I began with a sense of invisibility about myself. As I evolve I become more visible. When I'm 100, if I manage to write lots of plays, I can read them all in a row and it may give me some vague sense - only vague - of what I am and was.

[on using LSD] It was a transporting experience, expressed in very concrete images, places and periods. It involved both generic pictures [from China and the Congo] and more strictly autobiographical ones (a book-laden boy in perhaps 1850 walking to Hebrew School through a labyrinth of alleys, perhaps in Kiev). I have never forgotten it or moved far from the sense of wonder it provided and a fairly constant gratitude for the infinite complexity of being it revealed to me.

I think the live experience in the theatre is very important when you can see shocks and murmurs going through the house. It has a communal nature. A great play or a great production is a revelation, this is the function of all art, it doesn't have to be solemn - it's a moment, a leap of excitement inside oneself, which can be attached to a moral insight or a laugh, and it comes bolting out like rabbits out of a hedge.

In London, Equus caused a sensation because it displayed cruelty to horses; in New York, because it allegedly displayed cruelty to psychiatrists.