The sheer complexity of writing a play always had dazzled me. In an effort to understand it, I became a critic.

Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding.

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

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

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

Western man, especially the Western critic, still find it very had to go into print and say: "I recommend you to go and see this because it gave me an erection."

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.