Daily Inspiration Quote by Howard Barker

Barker’s line is a preemptive strike on the kind of cultural consumption that treats art like a press release. The scare quotes around "say" and "said" do the heavy lifting: they mock the pious demand that a play arrive with a moral, a “message,” something a reviewer can summarize and a school can teach. In Barker’s world, interpretation isn’t a service the artist provides; it’s a risk the audience must take.

The intent is partly defensive, partly aggressive. Defensive because Barker’s theater has long been tagged as difficult, erotic, violent, politically uncooperative. If you’re perpetually asked what your work “means,” you start to hear the question as an attempt to domesticate it. Aggressive because he’s also baiting the audience: if he refuses to “say” anything, you can’t outsource your response to the author’s authority. You have to sit in the discomfort of conflicting impulses, where ethics and desire don’t line up neatly.

The subtext is a critique of didacticism disguised as artistic humility. “I invent a world” sounds modest, but it’s a power move: world-building implies a sovereign aesthetic logic, not an argument to be won. Barker is aligning himself with art that functions less like an op-ed and more like an ecosystem - full of competing weather systems, not a single forecast.

Context matters: post-war British theater often toggled between social realism and political instruction. Barker rejects both the kitchen-sink mandate to “represent” and the agitprop urge to “correct.” He’s staking a claim for ambiguity as a form of seriousness, not evasiveness.