Quotes from Laurence Housman

Prosecution I have managed to avoid; but I have been arrested, charged in a police court, have refused to be bound over, and thereupon have been unconditionally released - to my great regret; for I have always wanted to know what going to prison was like.

I shall not die young, for I am already near seventy: I may die old.

It is the sincerest thing I have written, caught by the drama of a soul struggling in the contrary toils of love and religion - death brought them into harmony.

I was just then going through a healthy reaction from the orthodoxy of my youth religion had become for me not so much a possession as an obsession, which I was trying to throw off, and this iconoclastic tale of an imaginary tribe was the result.

Suicide is possible, but not probable hanging, I trust, is even more unlikely for I hope that, by the time I die, my countrymen will have become civilised enough to abolish capital punishment.

My failure, during the first five or six years of my art training, to get set in the right direction, and the disappointment which it caused me, drove me the more persistently into writing as an alternative.

Suicide is possible, but not probable; hanging, I trust, is even more unlikely; for I hope that, by the time I die, my countrymen will have become civilised enough to abolish capital punishment.

Life is the most versatile thing under the sun; and in the pursuit of life and character the author who works in a groove works in blinkers.

My best chance is that, in a happy moment, I hit upon St Francis as the subject for a series of plays. Others might have written them better: but, as I have written them, the advantage will probably remain mine.