Art and ideology often interact on each other; but the plain fact is that both spring from a common source. Both draw on human experience to explain mankind to itself; both attempt, in very different ways, to assemble coherence from seemingly unrelated phenomena; both stand guard for us against chaos.

It is Ireland's sacred duty to send over, every few years, a playwright to save the English theater from inarticulate glumness.

Not content to have the audience in the palm of his hand, he goes one further and clenches his fist.

A good many inconveniences attend playgoing in any large city, but the greatest of them is usually the play itself.

A city whose living immediacy is so urgent that when I am in it I lose all sense of the past.

William Congreve is the only sophisticated playwright England has produced; and like Shaw, Sheridan, and Wilde, his nearest rivals, he was brought up in Ireland.

Show me a congenital eavesdropper with the instincts of a Peeping Tom and I will show you the making of a dramatist.