82 quotes
I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you might nudge the world a little or make a poem that children will speak for you when you are dead.
The Real Thing (1982)
The Church's idea of the good and the beautiful excludes sexual aberration, apart from chastity, I suppose because it's the rarest
The Invention of Love (1997)
There is presumably a calendar date — a moment — when the onus of proof passed from the atheist to the believer, when, quite suddenly, secretly, the noes had it.
Jumpers (1972)
There must have been a time, in the beginning, when we could have said – no. But somehow we missed it.
I had no idea Gwendolen knew any foreign languages, and I am not sure that I approve. It's the sort of thing that can only broaden a girl's mind.
Travesties (1974)
Wake me up for breakfast, if I'm not dead.
The Coast of Utopia: Salvage (2002)
My life is marked by long silences.
The Invention of Love (1997)
A healthy attitude is contagious; but don’t wait to catch it from others. Be a carrier.
There Will Always be a Tree (2010)
It seems pointless to be quoted if one isn't going to be quotable … it's better to be quotable than honest.
To dream of taking the sword in the breast, the bullet in the brain [...] and wake up to find the world goes wretchedly on and you will die of age and not of pain.
The Invention of Love (1997)
ROS (an anguished cry): Consistency is all I ask!
GUIL (low, wry rhetoric): Give us this day our daily mask.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966)
(Falls down in a drunken stupor): Let's sit down.
The Coast of Utopia: Salvage (2002)
War is capitalism with the gloves off and many who go to war know it but they go to war because they don't want to be a hero. It takes courage to sit down and be counted.
Travesties (1974)
Including, I suppose, death. ... It's an interesting view of atheism, as a sort of crutch for those who can't bear the reality of God.
Jumpers (1972)
To be an artist at all is like living in Switzerland during a world war. To be an artist in Zurich, in 1917, implies a degree of self-absorption that would have glazed over the eyes of Narcissus.
Travesties (1974)
PLAYER: Life is a gamble, at terrible odds—if it was a bet you wouldn’t take it.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966)
ROS: Be happy—if you’re not even happy, what’s so good about surviving?
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966)
ROS: I want a good story, with a beginning, middle and end.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966)
I'd push the lot of you over a cliff myself. Except the one in the wheelchair, I think I'd lose the sympathy vote before people had time to think it through.
Arcadia (1993)
How the hell do I know what I find incredible? Credibility is an expanding field... Sheer disbelief hardly registers on the face before the head is nodding with all the wisdom of instant hindsight.
Jumpers (1972)