All your life you live so close to truth, it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye, and when something nudges it into outline it is like being ambushed by a grotesque.

I write plays because dialogue is the most respectable way of contradicting myself.

Happiness is equilibrium. Shift your weight.

Traitors hoist by their own petard?--or victims of the gods?--we shall never know!

People think there's a choice between smoking and immortality, but we've all got to die of something.

Well I believe in the desirability of an optimal society.

Comparing what we're looking for misses the point. It's wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we're going out the way we came in. That's why you can't believe in the afterlife, Valentine. Believe in the after, by all means, but not the life. Believe in God, the soul, the spirit, the infinite, believe in angels if you like, but not in the great celestial get-together for an exchange of views. If the answers are in the back of the book I can wait, but what a drag. Better to struggle on knowing that failure is final.