August Strindberg
August Strindberg
Johan August Strindberg; 22 January 1849 – 14 May 1912) was a Swedish playwright, novelist, poet, essayist and painter. A prolific writer who often drew directly on his personal experience, Strindberg's career spanned four decades, during which time he wrote over 60 plays and more than 30 works of fiction, autobiography, history, cultural analysis, and politics. A bold experimenter and iconoclast throughout, he explored a wide range of dramatic methods and purposes, from naturalistic tragedy, monodrama, and history plays, to...
NationalitySwedish
ProfessionPlaywright
Date of Birth22 January 1849
CityStockholm, Sweden
CountrySweden
[My characters are] conglomerations of past and present stages of civilization, bits from books and newspapers, scraps of humanity, rags and tatters of fine clothing, patched together as is the human soul
Because in the midst of happiness there is always a seed of unhappiness; it consumes itself like fire--it can't burn forever, sooner or later it must die; and this presentiment of the end destroys my happiness when it is at is height.
It's risky to take anything on good faith where a woman is concerned.
When aristocrats pretend they're common people -- they get common!
Oh, I have loved him too much to feel no hate for him.
Everything can happen, everything is possible and probable. Time and place do not exist; on a significant bases of reality, the imagination spins, weaving new patterns; a mixture of memories, experiences, free fancies, incongruities and improvisations.
A man with a so-called character is often a simple piece of mechanism; he has often only one point of view for the extremely complicated relationships of life.
When is revolution legal? When it succeeds!
Why is it so painful to watch a person sink? Because there is something unnatural in it, for nature demands personal progress, evolution, and every backward step means wasted energy.
Sorrow has the fortunate peculiarity that it preys upon itself. It dies of starvation. Since it is essentially an interruption of habits, it can be replaced by new habits. Constituting, as it does, a void, it is soon filled up by a real horror vacuum.
I see the playwright as a lay preacher peddling the ideas of his time in popular form.
Now I know the full power of evil. It makes ugliness seem beautiful and goodness seem ugly and weak.
I always disliked dogs, those protectors of cowards who lack the courage to fight an assailant themselves.
Friendship can only exist between persons with similar interests and points of view. Man and woman by the conventions of society are born with different interests and different points of view.