28 Quotes by Howard Barker

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.

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

I’m not interested in observed reality.

I don’t like sympathetic characters.

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

I wish I were not sensual... I wish I had not got from my mother, or my father was it, this need to grasp and be grasped, because it drives me into the arms of idiots who want to crush me. Wonderful, idiotic, crushing in the night. Can’t you just crush me in the night?

Idiot, yes. All my life I struggled. That is the mark of an idiiot.

A good play puts the audience through a certain ordeal.