Quotes By Edward Bond

You have to learn the language of Hamlet.

We are still living in the aftershock of Hiroshima, people are still the scars of history.

Fifteen years ago I walked out of a production of one of my plays at the RSC because I decided it was a waste of time.

Our unconscious is not more animal than our conscious, it is often even more human.

First there was the theatre of people and animals, then of people and the devil. Now we need the theatre of people and people.

It seems to me that we are profoundly ignorant of ourselves.

All you now do is pursue your private objectives within society. Instead of us being a community, everybody is asked to seek their own personal ends. It's called competition. And competition is antagonism.

I write plays not to make money, but to stop myself from going mad. Because it's my way of making the world rational to me.

It's politely assumed that democracy is a means of containing and restraining violence. But violence comes not from genes but from ideas.

The truth has got to appear plausible on the stage.

The one overall structure in my plays is language.

Humanity's become a product and when humanity is a product, you get Auschwitz and you get Chair.

The human mind is a dramatic structure in itself and our society is absolutely saturated with drama.

Now, drama is quite useful at helping us to understand what our position is and, conversely, we might then understand why our theatre is being destroyed.

I don't think it's the job of theatre at the moment to provide political propaganda; that would be simplistic. We have to explore our situation further before we will understand it.

I think there is no world without theatre.

The English sent all their bores abroad, and acquired the Empire as a punishment.

In the past goodness was always a collective experience. Then goodness became privatised.

If you engage people on a vital, important level, they will respond.

What I try to do in a play is put a problem on stage, head-on, without evasion.

At the turn of the century theatre does not have to be prescriptive.

The theatre, our theatre, comes from the Greeks.

I'm interested in the real world.

Religion enabled society to organise itself to debate goodness, just as Greek drama had once done.

Violence is hidden within democratic structures because they are not radically democratic - Western democracy is merely a domestic convenience of consumerism.

It's insulting to ask a dramatist what his view of his play is. I have no opinion.

The Greeks said very, very extreme things in their tragedies.

What Shakespeare and the Greeks were able to do was radically question what it meant to be a human being.

I'm not interested in an imaginary world.

Whatever the economy needs to maintain itself, the government will do it.