Quotes By Harold Pinter

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

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

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.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

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.

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

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.

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

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 also found being called Sir rather silly.

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.

One's life has many compartments.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.