Edward Bond Quotes

I'm not interested in an imaginary world

I think there is no world without theatre.

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

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

I write about violence as naturally as Jane Austen wrote about manners. Violence shapes and obsesses our society, and if we do not stop being violent we have no future.

In the end I think theatre has only one subject: justice

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

Auschwitz is a place in which tragedy cannot occur.

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

We may seem competent, but by the end of next century there will be new deserts, new ruins.

Our lives are awkward and fragile and we have only one thing to keep us sane: pity, and the man without pity is mad.

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

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.

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

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

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

But we are not in the world to be good but to change it.

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

Law and order is one of the steps taken to maintain injustice.

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.

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

Art is the expression of the conviction that we can have a rational relationship with the world and each other. It isn't the faith or hope that we can, it is the demonstration that we can.

Art is the close scrutiny of reality and therefore I put on the stage only those things that I know happen in our society.

When humanness is lost the radical difference between the bodies in the pit and people walking on the street is lost.

As Shakespeare himself knew, the peace, the reconciliation that he created on the stage would not last an hour on the street.

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

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.

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

The truth has got to appear plausible on the stage

The one overall structure in my plays is language

The theatre, our theatre, comes from the Greeks

You have to learn the language of Hamlet.

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.

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

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

Shakespeare has no answers for us at all

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

It seems to me that we are profoundly ignorant of ourselves

I'm interested in the real world.

Violence is never a solution in my plays, just as ultimately violence is never a solution in human affairs.

It's wonderful to be able to sit down and write a play.

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.