Quotes By Harold Pinter

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.

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

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

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.

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 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.

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

One's life has many compartments.

I think that NATO is itself a war criminal.

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.

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.

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

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.