Quotes from Caryl Churchill

What's poetry? It's not real but maybe it's more than real. It's dreaming while you're awake.

How could I go on my travels without that sweet soul waiting at home for my letters?

You're pretending this isn't your life. You think it's going to happen some other time. When you're dead you'll realise you were alive now.

People aren't evil and people aren't good. They live how they can one day at a time. They come out of dust they go back to dust, dusty feet, no wings, and whose fault is that?

You make beauty and it disappears, I love that.

I do enjoy the form of things. I enjoy finding the form that seems best to fit what I'm thinking about. I don't set out to find a bizarre way of writing.

Maud: Young women are never happy. Betty: Mother, what a thing to say. Maud: Then when they're older they look back and see that comparatively speaking they were ecstatic.

Harry: I supposed getting married wouldn't be any worse than killing myself.

There was someone called Hippasus in Greek times who found out about the diagonal of a square and they drowned him because no one wanted to know about things like that. Like what? Numbers that make you uncomfortable and don't relate to oranges.

I'll take her no mistake no mister no missed her no mist no miss no me no.

NIJO: I'm not a cheerful person, Marlene. I just laugh a lot.

You make beauty and it disappears, I love that.

Twigs and beetles and dead body. Water and blood. You'll never get back.

Glegg: But do you intend to be dead? Worsely: I try to. My doctor says I'm so safety prone I must have a lifewish. I have a sense of humour about psychiatrists.

numbers that make you uncomfortable and don't relate to oranges

Maybe he should have kept quiet about if he knew they couldn't stand it. Is that what you do?

Martin: Yes, I'd like to go home and do some work. I'm writing a novel about women from the women's point of view.

Worsely: You know what you were saying about a plastic bag. Suppose I put a plastic bag around my head and tied it tightly round the neck. What could possibly go wrong? Clegg: Some of them nowadays has safety holes. Worsely: Not all. I would have a look

Drunk enough to say I love you? - Caryl Churchill

Do you think you're well enough to do this job. You don't have to do it. No one's going to think any the less of you if you stay here with me. There's no point being so liberated you make yourself cry all the time. You stay and we'll get everything sorted out. What it is about sex, when we talk while it's happening I get to feel it's like a driving lesson. Left, right, a little faster, carry on, slow down...

I am perfectly calm. I am just outspoken.

But if there isn't a right way to do things you have to invent one.

Or maybe there was no one there at all and you'd gone out so no matter how hard I shouted there was no one there.

I was fed up with the situation I found myself in in the 1960s. I didn't like being a barrister's wife and going out to dinner with other professional people and dealing with middle class life. It seemed claustrophobic.