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