Howard Barker Quotations

I have plenty of political views and plenty of social and personal prejudices. I do not, however, value them.

We are suffocated by writers who want to enlighten us with their truths. For me, the theatre is beautiful because it is a secret, and secrets seduce us, we all want to share secrets.

I submit all my plays to the National Theatre for rejection. To assure myself I am seeing clearly.

I never 'say' anything in my work. I invent a world. Let others decide what is being 'said'.

Theatre should be a taxing experience: the greatest achievement of a writer is to produce a character who creates anxiety.

A good play puts the audience through a certain ordeal,

I believe in poetic discourse, in the value of speech in a non-naturalistic way; it's speculative.

When I write, I am not giving a lecture, I am speculating on behavior. Sometimes this is dangerous, but it should be. As I say often, theatre is a dark place and we should keep the light out of it.

I am so far as I am aware not at all influenced by dramatists, expect for Shakespeare, who I have to say, it is impossible not to be influenced by if you hold language to be the major element of theatre.

I’ve often taken important classical, biblical or literary stories and interrogated them. I have tried to reinvigorate Lot by interpreting it differently.

I am compelled to write because I have an artist's personality, it is a psychologically-determined thing, one best not explored perhaps. But I write because I must. And frequently I do not know what I am writing, and can talk of what I've written only a long time afterwards.

Certainly I never write for utilitarian reasons - to help others understand issues, to improve society and so on. I regard those as fatuous pretexts. Let us keep social work out of the theatre.

The artist who makes himself accessible is self-destructive.

It is impossible – now, at this point in the long journey of human culture – to avoid the sense that pain is necessity; that it is neither accident, nor malformation, nor malice, nor misunderstanding, that it is integral to the human character both in its inflicting and in its suffering, this terrible sense Tragedy alone has articulated, and will continue to articulate, and in so doing, make beautiful…

You emerge from tragedy equipped against lies. After the musical, you're anybody's fool

Tragedy is the greatest art form of all. It gives us the courage to continue with our life by exposing us to the pain of life. It is unsentimental, it takes us seriously as human beings, it is not condescending. Paradoxically, by seeing pain we are made greater, it becomes a need.

I'm not interested in entertainment.

I'm not interested in observed reality.

I don't like sympathetic characters.

The English (I cannot speak of the Scots) are moralistic, and have made moralizing their discipline since the reformation. They like to be told what to think, and their literary heroes are moralists.