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

What, when drunk, one sees in other women, one sees in Garbo sober.

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.

A novel is a static thing that one moves through; a play is a dynamic thing that moves past one.

A critic is a man who knows the way but can't drive the car.

There, standing at the piano, was the original good time who had been had by all.

Among the classic tastes: bread sauce, Nuits St Georges Les Perdrix 1962, Worcestershire sauce, Toblerone and Bovril.