Alan Ayckbourn Quotations

Plays by Alan Ayckbourn have been attracting larger audiences in the regional theatres than those of Shakespeare.

A comedy is just a tragedy interrupted, I once said. Do you finish with the kiss or when she opens her eyes to tell him she loves him and sees blonde hairs on his collar?

Salad, I can't bear salad. It grows while you're eating it, you know.

He really is terribly heavy going. Like running up hill in roller skates.

What I find interesting is how close you can run the laughter along the seam of seriousness, and occasionally cross it, so that half the house genuinely doesn't know whether to laugh or cry. Custard pie humour is fairly universal, but at the other end, which I'm more interested in, there's the humour that hovers on the darkness, that walks in the shadow of something else, not always that obvious.

Cats names are more for human benefit. They give one a certain degree more confidence that the animal belongs to you.

There is a school of thought that believes that sleep is for the night. You appear to be out to disprove them.

There are very few people on top of life, and the rest of us don't like them very much.

The darker the subject, the more light you must try to shed on the matter. And vice versa.

A gentleman ... sleeps at his work. That's what work's for. Why do you think they have the SILENCE notices in the library? So as not to disturb me in my little nook behind the biography shelves.

If you are flattering a woman, it pays to be a little more subtle. You don't have to bother with men, they believe any compliment automatically.

I think of a plot, I think of an idea, and then I wonder, How can I get that onto the stage? . . . Whatever devices you use should always be there to serve the theme. If the theme has been overtaken by the device, then something's wrong.

As a writer one is allowed to have conversations with oneself. What is considered sane in writers is made for the rest of the human race.

Few women care to be laughed at and men not at all, except for large sums of money.

it couldn't have happened to a nicer person and it's a most fitting award.

We don't discuss anything anyway. Unless it appears on Patrick's official breakfast-time agenda. And that consists mainly of food. Minutes of the last meal and proposals for the next.

You might as well have put her on a stage eating a plate of spaghetti and put a rope round her chair instead of putting her in a theatre where she wasn't at home and was struggling.