I do not see the E.E.C. [European Economic Community] as a great love affair. It's more like nine middle aged couples with failing marriages meeting at a Brussels hotel for a group grope.

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

The greatest films are those which show how society shapes man. The greatest plays are those which show how man shapes society.

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.

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

Drama criticism ... is a self-knowing account of the way in which one's consciousness has been modified during an evening at the theatre.

If there's one thing I can't bear, it's people who are wise during the event.