And now everything has changed once again. The air of the Close each evening is full of bird song - I've never really noticed it before. Full of birdsong and summer perfumes, full of strange glimpses and intimations just out of the corner of my eye, of longings and sadness and undefined hopes.It has a name, this sweet disturbance. Its name is Lamorna.

Even in the things that look most frivolous there has to be the threat of something quite painful to make the comedy work. I suppose the play of mine that's best know is NOISES OFF, which everyone thinks is a simple farce about actors making fools of themselves. But I think it makes people laugh because everyone is terrified inside themselves of having some kind of breakdown, of being unable to go on. When people laugh at that play, they're laughing at a surrogate version of the disaster which might occur to them.

You just have to work with what God sends, and if God doesn't seem to understand the concept of commercial success than that's your bad luck.

When anyone says they often think something, it means they've just thought of it now.

Everything is as it was, I discover when I reach my destination, and everything has changed.

We have one set of obligations to the world in general, and we have other sets never to be reconciled to our fellow-countrymen, to our neighbors, to our friends, to our family, to our children.

To be absolutely honest, what I feel really bad about is that I don't feel worse. There's the ineffectual liberal's problem in a nutshell.