The maddest phenomenon in this wholly mad world – that the filming or wirelessing of an event, whether it is the Grand National or an attack in force on the Maginot Line, is held to be of more importance than the event itself.

The worst of failure of this kind is that it spoils the market for more competent performers.

Long experience has taught me that in England nobody goes to the theatre unless he or she has bronchitis.

I don't know very much but what I do know I know better than anybody, and I don't want to argue about it…My mind is not a bed to be made and re-made.

Don't pity me now, don't pity me never; I'm going to do nothing for ever and ever.

I... wonder what it is in the New York air that enables me to sit up till all hours of the night in an atmosphere which in London would make a horse dizzy, but here merely clears the brain.

Shaw's plays are the price we pay for Shaw's prefaces.