Best 9 quotes of Eric Bentley on MyQuotes

A play has two authors, the playwright and the actor.

Even in a jungle, lovely flowers will spring up here and there, such being the fecundity of nature, and however badly our pastors and masters run our society, however much they pull to pieces that which they claim to be keeping intact, nature remains fecund, human beings are born with human traits, sometimes human strength outweighs human weakness, and human grace shows itself amid human ugliness. ‘In the bloodiest times,’ as our play has it, ‘there are kind people.’

Fashion, which elevates the bad to the level of the good, subsequently turns its back on bad and good alike.

Geography is about maps, but biography is about chaps.

If melodrama is the quintessence of drama, farce is the quintessence of theatre. Melodrama is written. A moving image of the worldis provided by a writer. Farce is acted. The writer's contribution seems not only absorbed but translated.... One cannot imagine melodrama being improvised. The improvised drama was pre-eminently farce.

If one truly has lost hope, one would not be on hand to say so.

Like dreams, farces show the disguised fulfillment of repressed wishes.

Ours is the age of substitutes: Instead of language we have jargon; instead of principles, slogans; and instead of genuine ideas, bright suggestions.

Literature deals with morality but does not necessarily, does not, qua literature, help you to be more moral, either by precept or example. It makes you more aware. Which is to say that it makes you more human by making life more, not less, difficult. When you become more aware, the area of moral choice is widened. You can be a better man; you can also be a worse. Literature will not determine which. It is the equivalent of neither grace nor good works.