Quotes By Harold Pinter

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

I also found being called Sir rather silly.

One's life has many compartments.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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.

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

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?

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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 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.