Top 50 Harold Pinter Quotes

I wrote ‘The Room’, ‘The Birthday Party’, and ‘The Dumb Waiter’ in 1957, I was acting all the time in a repertory company, doing all kinds of jobs, traveling to Bournemouth and Torquay and Birmingham.

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.’

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.

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.

As far as I’m concerned, ‘The Caretaker’ is funny up to a point. Beyond that, it ceases to be funny, and it was because of that point that I wrote it.

Political theatre presents an entirely different set of problems. Sermonising has to be avoided at all cost. Objectivity is essential. The characters must be allowed to breathe their own air. The author cannot confine and constrict them to satisfy his own taste or disposition or prejudice.

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 always start a play by calling the characters A, B, and C.

Quite often, I have a compelling sense of how a role should be played. And I’m proved – equally as often – quite wrong.

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

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

I don’t idealise women. I enjoy them. I have been married to two of the most independent women it is possible to think of.

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

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

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

You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good.

I am absolutely not saying that Milosevic might not be responsible for all sorts of atrocities, but I believe that 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 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 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.

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

A few friends and me used to go and watch Bunuel, Carne, Cocteau… Cocteau and Bunuel were surrealism. And I was very excited by that. ‘Un Chien Andalou’, especially.

Analysis I take to be a scientific procedure. What I do is creative. It doesn’t spring from the same part of the mind.

I find the whole Blairish idea more and more repugnant every day. ‘New Labour’: the term itself is so trashy. Kind of ersatz.

I’ve never been able to understand what they mean by ‘Pinteresque,’. I’m sure it’s indefinable.

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

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

One’s life has many compartments.

I certainly feel sad about the alienation from my son.

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

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 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.

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.

All I’m saying is that there are many different kinds of political theatre and many plays I greatly admire: ‘Antigone,’ ‘Mother Courage,’ ‘All My Sons.’ But, if I tackle a political theme, I have to do it in my own way.

No one wanted me to be a conscientious objector. My parents certainly didn’t want it. My teacher and mentor, Joe Brearley, didn’t want it. My friends didn’t want it. I was alone.

I also found being called Sir rather silly.

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.

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’m well aware that I have been described in some quarters as being ‘enigmatic, taciturn, prickly, explosive and forbidding’. Well, I have my moods like anyone else; I won’t deny it.

I’ll tell you something, and this is true: I’ve never been able to write a film which I didn’t respect. I just can’t do it. I’m very happy about all the films I haven’t done.

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.

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

The effect of depleted uranium, used by America in the Gulf War, is never referred to.

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

I think that NATO is itself a war criminal.

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 whole brunt of the media and the government is to encourage people to be highly competitive and totally selfish and uncaring of others.

Only by the sweat of my own brow. I am a totally working man.

Cricket, the whole thing, playing, watching, being part of the Gaieties, has been a central feature of my life.

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