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
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.
There comes a moment... When imagination gives out and Reality leaps forth. It is frightful!
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 wonderful how, the moment you talk about God and love, your voice becomes hard, and your eyes fill with hatred. No, Margret, you certainly haven't the true faith.
I, too, am beginning to feel an immense need to become a savage and create a new world.
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.
What is economics? A science invented by the upper class in order to acquire the fruits of the labor of the underclass
In the old days, one married a wife; now one forms a company with a female partner, or moves in to live with a friend. And then one seduces the partner, or defiles the friend.
What an occupation! To sit and flay your fellow men and then offer their skins for sale and expect them to buy them.
God preserve us from writers who regurgitate what they have learnt from books! It is people's secrets we want to know - it is the natural history of the human heart that we have been trying to put down for a thousand years and everyone must and can leave their contribution.
I've thought of becoming a photographer! To save my talent as a writer.
[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
Life is not so idiotically mathematical that only the big eat the small; it is just as common for a bee to kill a lion or at least to drive it mad.
When people refuse to speak out for too long, it's like water that's stagnant and starts to rot!