All generalizations are dangerous, even this one.

I was fed up with the situation I found myself in in the 1960s. I didn't like being a barrister's wife and going out to dinner with other professional people and dealing with middle class life. It...

I grew up at the piano, and I longed to write musicals.

Belief is a moral act for which the believer is to be held responsible.

Reading is to the mind what exercising is to the body.

If you steal from one author it's plagiarism; if you steal from many it's research.

When I start a book, it's every day. There is no Saturday, no Sunday. It's every day, because if I stop one day, I'm afraid of losing the book and losing the energy.

Life's too short for chess.

A noble heart cannot suspect in others the pettiness and malice that it has never felt.

Directors sometimes have good ideas that I wished I'd had, not on rewriting but simply on staging.

It is necessary to have wished for death in order to know how good it is to live.

Business? It's quite simple; it's other people's money.

Come live with me and be my love, And we will all the pleasures prove, That valleys, groves, hills, and fields, Woods, or steepy mountain yields.

I hated her now with a hatred more fatal than indifference because it was the other side of love.

Napoleon the Third was not much. He died in England, and was buried in a country church-yard much the same as Kiltartan. But Napoleon the First was a great man; it was given out of him there never...

Those who live, live off the dead.

Men die but an idea does not.

The reward of great men is that, long after they have died, one is not quite sure that they are dead.

A nose that can see is worth two that sniff.

What an occupation! To sit and flay your fellow men and then offer their skins for sale and expect them to buy them.

I always disliked dogs, those protectors of cowards who lack the courage to fight an assailant themselves.

To you, W. B. Yeats, good praiser, wholesome dispraiser, heavy-handed judge, open-handed helper of us all, I offer a play of my plays for every night of the week, because you like them, and because...

The best thing I know between France and England is the sea.

There is a time for departure even when there's no certain place to go.

I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.

What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it's curved like a road through mountains.

Contemplation seems to be about the only luxury that costs nothing.

Noble deeds and hot baths are the best cures for depression.