Quotes by Harold Pinter

• I never think of myself as wise. I think of myself as possessing a critical intelligence which I intend to allow to operate.
• 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 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 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.
• 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.
• It was difficult being a conscientious objector in the 1940's, but I felt I had to stick to my guns.
• It's so easy for propaganda to work, and dissent to be mocked.
• I ought not to speak about the dead because the dead are all over the place.
• 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 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.
• Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.
• 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 believe an international criminal court is very much to be desired.
• 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.
• Most of the press is in league with government, or with the status quo.
• Apart from the known and the unknown, what else is there?
• This particular nurse said, Cancer cells are those which have forgotten how to die. I was so struck by this statement.
• Beckett had an unerring light on things, which I much appreciated.
• 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 also found being called Sir rather silly.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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 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.
• The past is what you remember, imagine you remember, convince yourself you remember, or pretend you remember.
• The crimes of the U.S. throughout the world have been systematic, constant, clinical, remorseless, and fully documented but nobody talks about them.
• The Companion of Honour I regarded as an award from the country for 50 years of work - which I thought was okay.
• One's life has many compartments.
• One way of looking at speech is to say it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness.
• One is and is not in the centre of the maelstrom of it all.
• Occasionally it does hit me, the words on a page. And I still love doing that, as I have for the last 60 years.
• There are some good rules and there are some lousy rules.