A short piece of work means as much to me as a long piece of work.

I never think of myself as wise. I think of myself as possessing a critical intelligence which I intend to allow to operate.

My second play, The Birthday Party, I wrote in 1958 - or 1957. It was totally destroyed by the critics of the day, who called it an absolute load of rubbish.

I believe an international criminal court is very much to be desired.

How can the unknown merit reverence? In other words how can you revere that of which you are ignorant? At the same time, it would be ridiculous to propose that what we know merits reverence. What we know merits any one of a number of things, but it stands to reason reverence isn't one of them. In other words, apart from the known and the unknown, what else is there?

I don't intend to simply go away and write my plays and be a good boy. I intend to remain an independent and political intelligence in my own right.

One is and is not in the centre of the maelstrom of it all.