Edward Bond quotes:
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We are still living in the aftershock of Hiroshima, people are still the scars of history.
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I write about violence as naturally as Jane Austen wrote about manners. Violence shapes and obsesses our society, and if we do not stop being violent we have no future.
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When humanness is lost the radical difference between the bodies in the pit and people walking on the street is lost.
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Humanity's become a product and when humanity is a product, you get Auschwitz and you get Chair.
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All you now do is pursue your private objectives within society. Instead of us being a community, everybody is asked to seek their own personal ends. It's called competition. And competition is antagonism.
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Art is the close scrutiny of reality and therefore I put on the stage only those things that I know happen in our society.
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Violence is hidden within democratic structures because they are not radically democratic - Western democracy is merely a domestic convenience of consumerism.
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I don't think it's the job of theatre at the moment to provide political propaganda; that would be simplistic. We have to explore our situation further before we will understand it.
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Shakespeare has no answers for us at all.
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It's insulting to ask a dramatist what his view of his play is. I have no opinion.
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Religion enabled society to organise itself to debate goodness, just as Greek drama had once done.
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Violence is never a solution in my plays, just as ultimately violence is never a solution in human affairs.
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What I try to do in a play is put a problem on stage, head-on, without evasion.
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Auschwitz is a place in which tragedy cannot occur.
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The human mind is a dramatic structure in itself and our society is absolutely saturated with drama.
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It's wonderful to be able to sit down and write a play.
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In the past goodness was always a collective experience. Then goodness became privatised.
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Now, drama is quite useful at helping us to understand what our position is and, conversely, we might then understand why our theatre is being destroyed.
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It's politely assumed that democracy is a means of containing and restraining violence. But violence comes not from genes but from ideas.
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First there was the theatre of people and animals, then of people and the devil. Now we need the theatre of people and people.
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I'm not interested in an imaginary world
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I think there is no world without theatre.
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I'm not interested in an imaginary world.
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We may seem competent, but by the end of next century there will be new deserts, new ruins.
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Our unconscious is not more animal than our conscious, it is often even more human.
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If a god had made the world, might world always be right, that would be so wise, we'd be spared so much suffering. But we made the world - out of our smallness and weakness. Our lives are awkward and fragile...
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It seems to me that we are profoundly ignorant of ourselves.
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I write plays not to make money, but to stop myself from going mad. Because it's my way of making the world rational to me.
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If you engage people on a vital, important level, they will respond
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Our lives are awkward and fragile and we have only one thing to keep us sane: pity, and the man without pity is mad.
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As Shakespeare himself knew, the peace, the reconciliation that he created on the stage would not last an hour on the street.
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In the end I think theatre has only one subject: justice
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It's politely assumed that democracy is a means of containing and restraining violence. But violence comes not from genes but from ideas
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Art is the expression of the conviction that we can have a rational relationship with the world and each other. It isn't the faith or hope that we can, it is the demonstration that we can.
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But we are not in the world to be good but to change it.
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Our unconscious is not more animal than our conscious, it is often even more human
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It's wonderful to be able to sit down and write a play
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It's insulting to ask a dramatist what his view of his play is. I have no opinion
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It seems to me that we are profoundly ignorant of ourselves
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Shakespeare has no answers for us at all
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The truth has got to appear plausible on the stage
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Now, drama is quite useful at helping us to understand what our position is and, conversely, we might then understand why our theatre is being destroyed
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The Greeks said very, very extreme things in their tragedies.
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You have to learn the language of Hamlet.
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Law and order is one of the steps taken to maintain injustice.
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The theatre, our theatre, comes from the Greeks
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The human mind is a dramatic structure in itself and our society is absolutely saturated with drama
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I'm interested in the real world.
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Fifteen years ago I walked out of a production of one of my plays at the RSC because I decided it was a waste of time.
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At the turn of the century theatre does not have to be prescriptive.
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The English sent all their bores abroad, and acquired the Empire as a punishment.
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The one overall structure in my plays is language
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What Shakespeare and the Greeks were able to do was radically question what it meant to be a human being.