Harold Pinter Quotes

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If Milosevic is to be tried, he has to be tried by a proper court, an impartial, properly constituted court which has international respect.

It's so easy for propaganda to work, and dissent to be mocked.

Most of the press is in league with government, or with the status quo.

My second play, The Birthday Party, I wrote in 1958 - or 1957. It was totally destroyed by the critics of the day, who called it an absolute load of rubbish.

Occasionally it does hit me, the words on a page. And I still love doing that, as I have for the last 60 years.

One is and is not in the centre of the maelstrom of it all.

One's life has many compartments.

The Companion of Honour I regarded as an award from the country for 50 years of work - which I thought was okay.

The Room I wrote in 1957, and I was really gratified to find that it stood up. I didn't have to change a word.

There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.

There are some good rules and there are some lousy rules.

There is a movement to get an international criminal court in the world, voted for by hundreds of states-but with the noticeable absence of the United States of America.

There's a tradition in British intellectual life of mocking any non-political force that gets involved in politics, especially within the sphere of the arts and the theatre.

This particular nurse said, Cancer cells are those which have forgotten how to die. I was so struck by this statement.

While The United States is the most powerful nation the world has ever seen, it is also the most detested nation that the world has ever known.

Iraq is just a symbol of the attitude of western democracies to the rest of the world.

It was difficult being a conscientious objector in the 1940's, but I felt I had to stick to my guns.

The past is what you remember, imagine you remember, convince yourself you remember, or pretend you remember.

I mean, don't forget the earth's about five thousand million years old, at least. Who can afford to live in the past?

I tend to think that cricket is the greatest thing that God ever created on earth - certainly greater than sex, although sex isn't too bad either.

My first play was 'The Room', written when I was twenty-seven.

I wrote 'The Room', 'The Birthday Party', and 'The Dumb Waiter' in 1957, I was acting all the time in a repertory company, doing all kinds of jobs, traveling to Bournemouth and Torquay and Birmingham.

Quite often, I have a compelling sense of how a role should be played. And I'm proved - equally as often - quite wrong.

I left school at sixteen - I was fed up and restless. The only thing that interested me at school was English language and literature, but I didn't have Latin, and so couldn't go on to university. So I went to a few drama schools, not studying seriously; I was mostly in love at the time and tied up with that.

I've never been able to understand what they mean by 'Pinteresque,'. I'm sure it's indefinable.

Analysis I take to be a scientific procedure. What I do is creative. It doesn't spring from the same part of the mind.

I was told that, when 'Betrayal' was being produced by one of the provincial companies in England, the two actors playing those roles actually went into a pub one day and played that scene as if it were really happening to them. The people around them became very uncomfortable.

I think plays have nothing to do with one's own personal life. Not in my experience, anyway. The stuff of drama has to do, not with your subject matter, anyway, but with how you treat it. Drama includes pain, loss, regret - that's what drama is about!

I used to get up at five in the morning and play cricket.

Drama happens in big cricket matches. But also in small cricket matches.

Cricket, the whole thing, playing, watching, being part of the Gaieties, has been a central feature of my life.

The only theatre I ever saw was Shakespeare.

A few friends and me used to go and watch Bunuel, Carne, Cocteau... Cocteau and Bunuel were surrealism. And I was very excited by that. 'Un Chien Andalou', especially.

My father was a tailor. He worked from seven o'clock in the morning until seven at night. At least when he got home, my mother always cooked him a very good dinner. Lots of potatoes, I remember; he used to knock them down like a dose of salts. He needed it, after a 12-hour day.

All I can say is that I did admire 'The Lives of Others', which I thought was really about something and beautifully done.

George W. Bush is always protesting that he has the fate of the world in mind and bangs on about the 'freedom-loving peoples' he's seeking to protect. I'd love to meet a freedom-hating people.

One should also remember that the U.S. is the biggest exporter of torture weapons in the world, though the U.K. is not far behind in the league table. We never stopped, even under Robin Cook's supposedly ethical foreign policy.

All I'm saying is that there are many different kinds of political theatre and many plays I greatly admire: 'Antigone,' 'Mother Courage,' 'All My Sons.' But, if I tackle a political theme, I have to do it in my own way.

Truth in drama is forever elusive. You never quite find it, but the search for it is compulsive. The search is clearly what drives the endeavour. The search is your task.

Sometimes you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost.

I always start a play by calling the characters A, B, and C.

Political theatre presents an entirely different set of problems. Sermonising has to be avoided at all cost. Objectivity is essential. The characters must be allowed to breathe their own air. The author cannot confine and constrict them to satisfy his own taste or disposition or prejudice.

I am absolutely not saying that Milosevic might not be responsible for all sorts of atrocities, but I believe that what's been left out of public debate and the press is that there was a civil war going on there.

I find the whole Blairish idea more and more repugnant every day. 'New Labour': the term itself is so trashy. Kind of ersatz.

Only by the sweat of my own brow. I am a totally working man.

I certainly feel sad about the alienation from my son.

I don't idealise women. I enjoy them. I have been married to two of the most independent women it is possible to think of.

Things like Abu Ghraib and even Guantanamo are not new things: there are many precedents.

There was one man in the Labour government, Robin Cook, whom I had a very high regard for. He had the courage to speak out and to resign over Iraq. He was an admirable man. But resignation over a matter of principle is not a very fashionable thing in our society.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. I've written 29 damn plays. Isn't that enough?

I don't make judgments about my own work, and I don't analyze it; I just let it happen. That applies to everything I've done.

I do tend to think that I've written a great deal out of my unconscious because half the time I don't know what a given character is going to say next.

I'm always the interrogator. When I was an actor in rep, I always played sinister parts. The directors always said, 'If there's a nasty man about, cast Harold Pinter.'

The whole brunt of the media and the government is to encourage people to be highly competitive and totally selfish and uncaring of others.

The effect of depleted uranium, used by America in the Gulf War, is never referred to.

I'll tell you something, and this is true: I've never been able to write a film which I didn't respect. I just can't do it. I'm very happy about all the films I haven't done.

It's such a delicate business, the structure of film, isn't it? What happens if a scene is not there but two minutes later? It's an eternal, never-ending search, actually, which is very exciting. It really is.

No one wanted me to be a conscientious objector. My parents certainly didn't want it. My teacher and mentor, Joe Brearley, didn't want it. My friends didn't want it. I was alone.

You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good.

Many Americans, we know, are horrified by the posture of their government but seem to be helpless.

A character on stage who can present no convincing argument or information as to his past experience, his present behaviour or his aspirations, nor give a comprehensive analysis of his motives, is as legitimate and as worthy of attention as one who, alarmingly, can do all these things.

I'm well aware that I have been described in some quarters as being 'enigmatic, taciturn, prickly, explosive and forbidding'. Well, I have my moods like anyone else; I won't deny it.

Quite simply, my writing life has been one of relish, challenge, excitement.

As far as I'm concerned, 'The Caretaker' is funny up to a point. Beyond that, it ceases to be funny, and it was because of that point that I wrote it.

The crimes of the U.S. throughout the world have been systematic, constant, clinical, remorseless, and fully documented but nobody talks about them.

Apart from the known and the unknown, what else is there?

One way of looking at speech is to say it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

A short piece of work means as much to me as a long piece of work.

All that happens is that the destruction of human beings - unless they're Americans - is called collateral damage.

Beckett had an unerring light on things, which I much appreciated.

Clinton's hands remain incredibly clean, don't they, and Tony Blair's smile remains as wide as ever. I view these guises with profound contempt.

I also found being called Sir rather silly.

I believe an international criminal court is very much to be desired.

I could be a bit of a pain in the arse. Since I've come out of my cancer, I must say I intend to be even more of a pain in the arse.

I don't intend to simply go away and write my plays and be a good boy. I intend to remain an independent and political intelligence in my own right.

I don't think there's been any writer like Samuel Beckett. He's unique. He was a most charming man and I used to send him my plays.

I found the offer of a knighthood something that I couldn't possibly accept. I found it to be somehow squalid, a knighthood. There's a relationship to government about knights.

I never think of myself as wise. I think of myself as possessing a critical intelligence which I intend to allow to operate.

I ought not to speak about the dead because the dead are all over the place.

I think it is the responsibility of a citizen of any country to say what he thinks.

I think that NATO is itself a war criminal.

I was brought up in the War. I was an adolescent in the Second World War. And I did witness in London a great deal of the Blitz.

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