Howard Barker

“Clarity is the enemy of the poetic.”

“Tragedy is the most powerful form of art because it doesn't offer any solutions.”

“I don't write for an audience. I write for the stage.”

“Catastrophe is the moment of truth. It's where the pretenses fall away.”

“The function of the tragic is to dignify suffering.”

“I am against the theatre of reassurance. I want a theatre that disturbs.”

“I am not interested in an audience that is comfortable.”

“Politics is far too simple for the theatre.”

“Language is the most important tool a playwright has. It is the music of the stage.”

“The audience is not a passive recipient but an active participant in the creation of meaning.”

“I do not believe theatre can move political mountains, but it can sensitize people.”

“A play should be an event, not a text.”

“An artist's responsibility is to be irresponsible.”

“A theatre that does not provoke is a theatre that is dead.”

“Pain is the authenticating fluid of art.”

“To be moral is to be conventional. To be conventional is to be dead.”

“The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.”

“My theatre is a theatre of extremity because I believe that's where truth lies.”

“The refusal to be good is a human right.”

“Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.”