Harold Pinter Quotes & Trivia



Quotes

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

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

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

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

Clinton and Blair, I certainly regard them as criminals.

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.

For the Americans, this death was obviously a very, very new experience, whereas it is not a new experience for people in Central and South America and Asia and India and all over the damn place, really.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

However critical I might or might not be about this country and Tony Blair and our relationship with America, I've been living and working here for nearly 60 years.

I also found being called Sir rather silly.

I am absolutely not saying that Milosevic might not be responsible for all sorts of atrocities, but I believe what's been left out of public debate and the press is that there was a civil war going on there.

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

I believe the NATO action itself was illegal, illegitimate, against international law and in contempt of the United Nations.

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.

I decided to go out on a limb. I had my Bar mitzvah when I was 13 and I never entered a synagogue again. I've never had anything to do with it.

I didn't have any sisters or brothers.

I didn't know whether I was going to die or not, and it's been quite a year from that point of view.

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 I've changed very much, really. But many things have changed in my life. For the last 27 years Antonia and I have been together. It seems to be only yesterday that we met.

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 found myself out on my own quite early, really.

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 love the English countryside. I find that extremely satisfying.

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

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

I really believe that Clinton and Blair should be arraigned as war criminals. They justified Serbia by talking about humanitarian intervention. And that kind of crap I think we've had enough of.

I still apply the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them, but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?

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.

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

I think that NATO is itself a war criminal.

I think you need two kinds of things to survive when you have a disease like this. You need a brilliant surgeon; and you need a brilliant wife. I was very fortunate in having both.

I was a conscientious objector in 1948, because they didn't like the idea of a Jewish boy going to prison. I was prepared to do that, for what I saw as very good reasons.

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 wasn't quite sure whether they had a Spanish Inquisition in Portugal, but according to my aunt, they certainly did.

I wrote the poem when I was having chemotherapy.

I'm more conscious of death. I've been very politically engaged. I can somehow find I'm seeing the world more objectively.

I'm not a Christian, but there is extraordinary, fundamental hypocrisy which is in itself extremely destructive, here, about this Iraq matter.

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

If you bomb Iraq, you're not just going to kill Saddam Hussein - you will kill thousands of totally innocent people.

In the US, you're looking at a government which is a business. And I think we're talking about big business in every respect here.

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

It was difficult being a conscientious objector in the 1940's, but I felt I had to stick to my guns.

It was quite extraordinary at the age of 71 to suddenly find myself in hospital facing a very severe cancer and a major operation. It was something I hadn't even considered.

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

Millions and millions of people have been given no chance to say what they thought at all because they are degraded, humiliated, oppressed.

Most of the press is in league with government, or with the status quo.

My position has been described as being comic. Do they regard the other 1,000 people who are part of this committee as comic? Is all dissent comic?

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.

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

One is and is not in the centre of the maelstrom of it all.

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

One's life has many compartments.

People don't call me poor darling any more.

People who criticise me imply that I'm talking wildly, at random. My understanding of these world facts are based on the facts themselves, and very serious research, which I do a great deal of the time.

So many people on the Western side masquerade as moral arbiters are pathetic. The way the press accepts what these entities say is very, very dangerous.

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

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

The kind of language used recently is justifying assertive acts to control power and keep power. Destroying human beings seems to be, to the powers that be, quite irrelevant.

The KLA, supported by the United States, was also responsible for this ethnic cleansing which has been going on in Kosovo.

The main bearing on my life at the moment is simply to survive. To remain here. And that comes down to very simple facts. How you use your energy, and as your energy grows, very gradually, how you actually dispose of it.

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

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.

The United States government and the British government are acting like thugs. And certainly they should be charged.

The United States want to get Milosevic, and they probably will.

The whole thing remains a kind of dark dream. It was like being in an impenetrable forest in which you literally couldn't see the wood for the trees. I'd never been ill in my life before.

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.

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

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.

There is an enormous amount of propaganda about Milosevic. We were told initially that he was responsible for the deaths of 100,000 people. That of course has never been proved, and is obviously not the case.

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.

They say that no American citizen will ever be arraigned if they have anything to do with it, in a real international criminal court.

They were always actually very sweet and very supportive of my writing, my mother and father.

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

Those high executives and those in government who are also in league will protect themselves to the ends of the earth.

We have 16 grandchildren. Domestically, my life has gone through an enormous transformation.

What happened in New York in September, suddenly those people, who didn't know they were part of it, found they were part of it. Not only part of it, but actually central to it.

When I hear Bush say, We are going to continue to fight terrorists, I can't even conceive of it. He's talking rubbish.

When I was about 14, I was in love. I was quite precocious. I was definitely in love with the girl down the road.

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.