Edward Bond quotes
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“If you engage people on a vital, important level, they will respond”
-- Edward BondSource : "Still bolshie after all these years" by Brian Logan, www.theguardian.com. April 4, 2000.
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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.”
-- Edward BondSource : Edward Bond (2014). “Bond Plays: 2: Lear; The Sea; Narrow Road to the Deep North; Black Mass; Passion”, p.3, A&C Black
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“In the end I think theatre has only one subject: justice”
-- Edward Bond -
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“The one overall structure in my plays is language”
-- Edward Bond -
“The theatre, our theatre, comes from the Greeks”
-- Edward Bond -
“Our unconscious is not more animal than our conscious, it is often even more human”
-- Edward Bond -
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“It's wonderful to be able to sit down and write a play”
-- Edward Bond -
“It's insulting to ask a dramatist what his view of his play is. I have no opinion”
-- Edward Bond -
“It's politely assumed that democracy is a means of containing and restraining violence. But violence comes not from genes but from ideas”
-- Edward Bond -
“The English sent all their bores abroad, and acquired the Empire as a punishment.”
-- Edward Bond -
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“We may seem competent, but by the end of next century there will be new deserts, new ruins.”
-- Edward Bond -
“What Shakespeare and the Greeks were able to do was radically question what it meant to be a human being.”
-- Edward Bond -
“What I try to do in a play is put a problem on stage, head-on, without evasion.”
-- Edward Bond -
“At the turn of the century theatre does not have to be prescriptive.”
-- Edward Bond -
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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.”
-- Edward Bond -
“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.”
-- Edward BondSource : Edward Bond (2013). “Lear”, p.12, A&C Black
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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.”
-- Edward BondSource : Edward Bond (2013). “Lear”, p.84, A&C Black
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“We are still living in the aftershock of Hiroshima, people are still the scars of history.”
-- Edward Bond -
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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.”
-- Edward Bond -
“It seems to me that we are profoundly ignorant of ourselves”
-- Edward Bond -
“Law and order is one of the steps taken to maintain injustice.”
-- Edward BondSource : Edward Bond (2014). “Bond Plays: 2: Lear; The Sea; Narrow Road to the Deep North; Black Mass; Passion”, p.5, A&C Black
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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.”
-- Edward Bond -
“Art is the close scrutiny of reality and therefore I put on the stage only those things that I know happen in our society.”
-- Edward Bond -
“Religion enabled society to organise itself to debate goodness, just as Greek drama had once done.”
-- Edward Bond -
“In the past goodness was always a collective experience. Then goodness became privatised.”
-- Edward Bond -
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“Violence is never a solution in my plays, just as ultimately violence is never a solution in human affairs.”
-- Edward Bond -
“Violence is hidden within democratic structures because they are not radically democratic - Western democracy is merely a domestic convenience of consumerism.”
-- Edward Bond -
“But we are not in the world to be good but to change it.”
-- Edward Bond -
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“Auschwitz is a place in which tragedy cannot occur.”
-- Edward Bond -
“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.”
-- Edward Bond -
“The truth has got to appear plausible on the stage”
-- Edward Bond -
“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”
-- Edward Bond -
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“The human mind is a dramatic structure in itself and our society is absolutely saturated with drama”
-- Edward Bond -
“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.”
-- Edward Bond -
“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.”
-- Edward Bond -
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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.”
-- Edward Bond -
“Humanity's become a product and when humanity is a product, you get Auschwitz and you get Chair.”
-- Edward BondSource : "Still bolshie after all these years" by Brian Logan, www.theguardian.com. April 4, 2000.
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“The Greeks said very, very extreme things in their tragedies.”
-- Edward Bond
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