Harold Pinter Quotes
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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.
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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.
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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.
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There are some good rules and there are some lousy rules.
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This particular nurse said, Cancer cells are those which have forgotten how to die. I was so struck by this statement.
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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.
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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.
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Praise the Lord for all good things. We blew their balls into shards of dust,Into shards of fucking dust. We did it. Now I want you to come over here and kiss me on the mouth.
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One way of looking at speech is to say it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness.
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Analysis I take to be a scientific procedure. What I do is creative. It doesn't spring from the same part of the mind.
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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.
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I think it is the responsibility of a citizen of any country to say what he thinks.
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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.
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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!
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My first play was 'The Room', written when I was twenty-seven.
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Quite often, I have a compelling sense of how a role should be played. And I'm proved - equally as often - quite wrong.
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All I can say is that I did admire 'The Lives of Others', which I thought was really about something and beautifully done.
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The only theatre I ever saw was Shakespeare.
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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.'
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I ought not to speak about the dead because the dead are all over the place.
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The past is what you remember, imagine you remember, convince yourself you remember, or pretend you remember.
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I also found being called Sir rather silly.
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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.
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One is and is not in the centre of the maelstrom of it all.