Howard Barker > Quotes

“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?”
― Howard Barker

“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.”
― Howard Barker

“It's time we started taking our audiences more seriously, and stop telling them stories they can understand.”
― Howard Barker

“You emerge from tragedy equipped against lies. After the musical, you're anybody's fool”
― Howard Barker, Arguments for a theatre

“ 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…”
― Howard Barker, Death, The One and the Art of Theatre

“I want to say
Without temper
If possible
without the least sense of the
heroic
Without even the measured
ambition
to speak the truth
which is only another vulgarity
To say
I am not what I was
Indeed
I was nothing
and now I am at least the
possibility
of
something
and this
I will defend.”
― Howard Barker

“Idiot, yes. All my life I struggled. That is the mark of an idiiot.”
― Howard Barker, The Possibilities