Harold Pinter Quotes

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living."

"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."

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

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

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

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

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

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."