Art & Creativity Quote by Edward Bond

There is a sly austerity in Edward Bond calling playwriting "wonderful" and leaving it at that, as if the miracle needs no ornament. Coming from a writer synonymous with bleak moral pressure and social violence, the line reads less like cozy gratitude and more like a claim about permission: to sit down, to take time, to occupy space in a culture that would rather you produce, perform, and move on. The verb choice matters. Not "compose" or "craft" but "sit down and write" - the blunt mechanics of work. Bond quietly sanctifies the desk.

The subtext is that the act itself is the victory. Bond's theatre has always treated drama as a public argument, not a private reverie; his plays don't merely entertain, they indict. So the "wonderful" here carries the relief of having a tool sharp enough to cut through euphemism. A play is a communal form: it presumes bodies in a room, conflict made legible, consequences staged. In that sense, the pleasure isn't escapist. It's civic.

Context sharpens it. Bond emerged in postwar Britain, in the wake of austerity, the welfare state's promises, and the theatre's turn toward anger and realism. He fought censorship, scandal, and institutional squeamishness (Saved being the famous flashpoint). Against that history, the sentence doubles as defiance: despite the gatekeepers, despite the grim material, it remains "wonderful" that he can still do the one thing that makes social reality arguable onstage.