Howard Barker Quotes

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

I don't like sympathetic characters.

I'm not interested in observed reality.

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

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

Theatre should be a taxing experience: the greatest achievement of a writer is to produce a character who creates anxiety.

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 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.

A good play puts the audience through a certain ordeal.

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

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.

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.

I have plenty of political views and plenty of social and personal prejudices. I do not, however, value them.

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

I'm not interested in entertainment.

The artist who makes himself accessible is self-destructive.

It is impossible - now, at this point in the long journey of human culture - to avoid the sense that pain is necessity; that it is neither accident, nor malformation, nor malice, nor misunderstanding, that it is integral to the human character both in its inflicting and in its suffering, this terrible sense Tragedy alone has articulated, and will continue to articulate, and in so doing, make beautiful...