Inspirational Quotes by Harold Pinter
I left school at sixteen – I was fed up and restless. The only thing that interested me at school was English language and literature, but I didn’t have Latin, and so couldn’t go on to university. So I went to a few drama schools, not studying seriously; I was mostly in love at the time and tied up with that.
Harold Pinter
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.
Harold Pinter
Quite simply, my writing life has been one of relish, challenge, excitement.
Harold Pinter
Only by the sweat of my own brow. I am a totally working man.
Harold Pinter
One way of looking at speech is to say it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness.
Harold Pinter
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.
Harold Pinter
Quite often, I have a compelling sense of how a role should be played. And I’m proved – equally as often – quite wrong.
Harold Pinter
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.
Harold Pinter
Things like Abu Ghraib and even Guantanamo are not new things: there are many precedents.
Harold Pinter
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.
Harold Pinter
Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.
Harold Pinter
It’s so easy for propaganda to work, and dissent to be mocked.
Harold Pinter
Drama happens in big cricket matches. But also in small cricket matches.
Harold Pinter
Apart from the known and the unknown, what else is there?
Harold Pinter
The past is what you remember, imagine you remember, convince yourself you remember, or pretend you remember.
Harold Pinter
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.
Harold Pinter
I mean, don’t forget the earth’s about five thousand million years old, at least. Who can afford to live in the past?
Harold Pinter
Cricket, the whole thing, playing, watching, being part of the Gaieties, has been a central feature of my life.
Harold Pinter
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.
Harold Pinter
One’s life has many compartments.
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.
Harold Pinter
I do tend to think that I’ve written a great deal out of my unconscious because half the time I don’t know what a given character is going to say next.
Harold Pinter
I used to get up at five in the morning and play cricket.
Harold Pinter
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.
Harold Pinter
All that happens is that the destruction of human beings – unless they’re Americans – is called collateral damage.
Harold Pinter
George W. Bush is always protesting that he has the fate of the world in mind and bangs on about the ‘freedom-loving peoples’ he’s seeking to protect. I’d love to meet a freedom-hating people.
Harold Pinter
This particular nurse said, Cancer cells are those which have forgotten how to die. I was so struck by this statement.
Harold Pinter
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.
Harold Pinter
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.
Harold Pinter
I also found being called Sir rather silly.
Harold Pinter
I ought not to speak about the dead because the dead are all over the place.
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.
Harold Pinter
I think it is the responsibility of a citizen of any country to say what he thinks.
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.
Harold Pinter
The effect of depleted uranium, used by America in the Gulf War, is never referred to.
Harold Pinter
The crimes of the U.S. throughout the world have been systematic, constant, clinical, remorseless, and fully documented but nobody talks about them.
Harold Pinter
A short piece of work means as much to me as a long piece of work.
Harold Pinter
Beckett had an unerring light on things, which I much appreciated.
Harold Pinter
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.
Harold Pinter
I believe an international criminal court is very much to be desired.
Harold Pinter
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.
Harold Pinter
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.
Harold Pinter
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.
Harold Pinter
I think that NATO is itself a war criminal.
Harold Pinter
If Milosevic is to be tried, he has to be tried by a proper court, an impartial, properly constituted court which has international respect.
Harold Pinter
Most of the press is in league with government, or with the status quo.
Harold Pinter
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.
Harold Pinter
Occasionally it does hit me, the words on a page. And I still love doing that, as I have for the last 60 years.
Harold Pinter
One is and is not in the centre of the maelstrom of it all.
Harold Pinter
The Companion of Honour I regarded as an award from the country for 50 years of work – which I thought was okay.
Harold Pinter
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.
Harold Pinter
There are some good rules and there are some lousy rules.
Harold Pinter