Quotes from Howard Barker

I don't like sympathetic characters.

A good play puts the audience through a certain ordeal.

I am so far as I am aware not at all influenced by dramatists, expect for Shakespeare, who I have to say, it is impossible not to be influenced by if you hold language to be the major element of theatre.

When I write, I am not giving a lecture, I am speculating on behavior. Sometimes this is dangerous, but it should be. As I say often, theatre is a dark place and we should keep the light out of it.

I submit all my plays to the National Theatre for rejection. To assure myself I am seeing clearly.

We are suffocated by writers who want to enlighten us with their truths. For me, the theatre is beautiful because it is a secret, and secrets seduce us, we all want to share secrets.

I've often taken important classical, biblical or literary stories and interrogated them. I have tried to reinvigorate Lot by interpreting it differently.

I'm not interested in entertainment.

I'm not interested in observed reality.

I never 'say' anything in my work. I invent a world. Let others decide what is being 'said'.

I believe in poetic discourse, in the value of speech in a non-naturalistic way; it's speculative.

I wish I were not sensual... I wish I had not got from my mother, or my father was it, this need to grasp and be grasped, because it drives me into the arms of idiots who want to crush me. Wonderful, idiotic, crushing in the night. Can't you just crush me in the night?

Tragedy is the greatest art form of all. It gives us the courage to continue with our life by exposing us to the pain of life. It is unsentimental, it takes us seriously as human beings, it is not condescending. Paradoxically, by seeing pain we are made greater, it becomes a need.

You emerge from tragedy equipped against lies. After the musical, you're anybody's fool

I want to say Without temper If possible without the least sense of the heroic Without even the measured ambition to speak the truth which is only another vulgarity To say I am not what I was Indeed I was nothing and now I am at least the possibility of something and this I will defend.

Idiot, yes. All my life I struggled. That is the mark of an idiiot.