1.
I'm not interested in an imaginary world
Edward Bond
2.
I think there is no world without theatre.
Edward Bond
3.
We are still living in the aftershock of Hiroshima, people are still the scars of history.
Edward Bond
4.
If you engage people on a vital, important level, they will respond.
Edward Bond
5.
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.
Edward Bond
6.
In the end I think theatre has only one subject: justice
Edward Bond
7.
Violence is hidden within democratic structures because they are not radically democratic - Western democracy is merely a domestic convenience of consumerism.
Edward Bond
8.
Auschwitz is a place in which tragedy cannot occur.
Edward Bond
9.
The Greeks said very, very extreme things in their tragedies.
Edward Bond
10.
We may seem competent, but by the end of next century there will be new deserts, new ruins.
Edward Bond
11.
Our lives are awkward and fragile and we have only one thing to keep us sane: pity, and the man without pity is mad.
Edward Bond
12.
The English sent all their bores abroad, and acquired the Empire as a punishment.
Edward Bond
13.
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.
Edward Bond
14.
It's politely assumed that democracy is a means of containing and restraining violence. But violence comes not from genes but from ideas
Edward Bond
15.
In the past goodness was always a collective experience. Then goodness became privatised.
Edward Bond
16.
Humanity's become a product and when humanity is a product, you get Auschwitz and you get Chair.
Edward Bond
17.
But we are not in the world to be good but to change it.
Edward Bond
18.
Religion enabled society to organise itself to debate goodness, just as Greek drama had once done.
Edward Bond
19.
Law and order is one of the steps taken to maintain injustice.
Edward Bond
20.
Our unconscious is not more animal than our conscious, it is often even more human
Edward Bond
21.
First there was the theatre of people and animals, then of people and the devil. Now we need the theatre of people and people.
Edward Bond
22.
The human mind is a dramatic structure in itself and our society is absolutely saturated with drama
Edward Bond
23.
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.
Edward Bond
24.
Art is the close scrutiny of reality and therefore I put on the stage only those things that I know happen in our society.
Edward Bond
25.
When humanness is lost the radical difference between the bodies in the pit and people walking on the street is lost.
Edward Bond
26.
As Shakespeare himself knew, the peace, the reconciliation that he created on the stage would not last an hour on the street.
Edward Bond
27.
At the turn of the century theatre does not have to be prescriptive.
Edward Bond
28.
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.
Edward Bond
29.
What I try to do in a play is put a problem on stage, head-on, without evasion.
Edward Bond
30.
The truth has got to appear plausible on the stage
Edward Bond
31.
The one overall structure in my plays is language
Edward Bond
32.
The theatre, our theatre, comes from the Greeks
Edward Bond
33.
You have to learn the language of Hamlet.
Edward Bond
34.
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.
Edward Bond
35.
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
Edward Bond
36.
What Shakespeare and the Greeks were able to do was radically question what it meant to be a human being.
Edward Bond
37.
Shakespeare has no answers for us at all
Edward Bond
38.
It's insulting to ask a dramatist what his view of his play is. I have no opinion
Edward Bond
39.
It seems to me that we are profoundly ignorant of ourselves
Edward Bond
40.
I'm interested in the real world.
Edward Bond
41.
Violence is never a solution in my plays, just as ultimately violence is never a solution in human affairs.
Edward Bond
42.
It's wonderful to be able to sit down and write a play.
Edward Bond
43.
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.
Edward Bond
