Edward Bond
Religion enabled society to organise itself to debate goodness, just as Greek drama had once done.Collection: Society
We are still living in the aftershock of Hiroshima, people are still the scars of history.Collection: History
I think there is no world without theatre.
The human mind is a dramatic structure in itself and our society is absolutely saturated with drama.
Violence is never a solution in my plays, just as ultimately violence is never a solution in human affairs.
If you engage people on a vital, important level, they will respond.
In the end I think theatre has only one subject: justice.
Shakespeare has no answers for us at all.
What Shakespeare and the Greeks were able to do was radically question what it meant to be a human being.
I'm not interested in an imaginary world.
In the past goodness was always a collective experience. Then goodness became privatised.
Humanity's become a product and when humanity is a product, you get Auschwitz and you get Chair.
Our unconscious is not more animal than our conscious, it is often even more human.
But we are not in the world to be good but to change 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.
Art is the close scrutiny of reality and therefore I put on the stage only those things that I know happen in our society.
Auschwitz is a place in which tragedy cannot occur.
What I try to do in a play is put a problem on stage, head-on, without evasion.
I'm interested in the real world.
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.
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.
It seems to me that we are profoundly ignorant of ourselves.
At the turn of the century theatre does not have to be prescriptive.
The English sent all their bores abroad, and acquired the Empire as a punishment.
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.
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.
It's insulting to ask a dramatist what his view of his play is. I have no opinion.
It's politely assumed that democracy is a means of containing and restraining violence. But violence comes not from genes but from ideas.
It's wonderful to be able to sit down and write a play.
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.
The Greeks said very, very extreme things in their tragedies.
The one overall structure in my plays is language.
The theatre, our theatre, comes from the Greeks.
The truth has got to appear plausible on the stage.
Violence is hidden within democratic structures because they are not radically democratic - Western democracy is merely a domestic convenience of consumerism.
We may seem competent, but by the end of next century there will be new deserts, new ruins.
Whatever the economy needs to maintain itself, the government will do it.
When humanness is lost the radical difference between the bodies in the pit and people walking on the street is lost.
You have to go to the ultimate situation in drama.
You have to learn the language of Hamlet.
I write about violence as naturally as Jane Austen wrote about manners. Violence shapes and obsesses our society, and if we do not stop being violent we have no future.Collection: Writing
In the end I think theatre has only one subject: justiceCollection: Thinking
Our lives are awkward and fragile and we have only one thing to keep us sane: pity, and the man without pity is mad.Collection: Men
Art is the expression of the conviction that we can have a rational relationship with the world and each other. It isn't the faith or hope that we can, it is the demonstration that we can.Collection: Art
I'm not interested in an imaginary worldCollection: World
The human mind is a dramatic structure in itself and our society is absolutely saturated with dramaCollection: Drama
It's politely assumed that democracy is a means of containing and restraining violence. But violence comes not from genes but from ideasCollection: Mean
Law and order is one of the steps taken to maintain injustice.Collection: Taken
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 destroyedCollection: Drama
As Shakespeare himself knew, the peace, the reconciliation that he created on the stage would not last an hour on the street.Collection: Lasts