Quotes from Edward Bond

I'm interested in the real world.

I think there is no world without theatre.

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.

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

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

The theatre, our theatre, comes from the Greeks.

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

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

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

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.

You have to learn the language of Hamlet.

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

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.

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

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

Auschwitz is a place in which tragedy cannot occur.

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

You have to go to the ultimate situation in drama.

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

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

I'm not interested in an imaginary world.

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

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