Harold Pinter
Iraq is just a symbol of the attitude of western democracies to the rest of the world.Collection: Attitude
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!Collection: Experience
I never think of myself as wise. I think of myself as possessing a critical intelligence which I intend to allow to operate.Collection: Intelligence
My father was a tailor. He worked from seven o'clock in the morning until seven at night. At least when he got home, my mother always cooked him a very good dinner. Lots of potatoes, I remember; he used to knock them down like a dose of salts. He needed it, after a 12-hour day.Collection: Morning
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.Collection: Truth
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.Collection: Intelligence
I certainly feel sad about the alienation from my son.Collection: Sad
I mean, don't forget the earth's about five thousand million years old, at least. Who can afford to live in the past?Collection: Moving
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.Collection: Funny
I think that NATO is itself a war criminal.Collection: War
Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.Collection: Communication
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.Collection: Birthday
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.Collection: Smile
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.Collection: Politics
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.Collection: Birthday
I used to get up at five in the morning and play cricket.
Drama happens in big cricket matches. But also in small cricket matches.
The only theatre I ever saw was Shakespeare.
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.
All I can say is that I did admire 'The Lives of Others', which I thought was really about something and beautifully done.
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.
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.
I always start a play by calling the characters A, B, and C.
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 find the whole Blairish idea more and more repugnant every day. 'New Labour': the term itself is so trashy. Kind of ersatz.
Only by the sweat of my own brow. I am a totally working man.
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.
Things like Abu Ghraib and even Guantanamo are not new things: there are many precedents.
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.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. I've written 29 damn plays. Isn't that enough?
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.
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.
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.'
The whole brunt of the media and the government is to encourage people to be highly competitive and totally selfish and uncaring of others.
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.
It's such a delicate business, the structure of film, isn't it? What happens if a scene is not there but two minutes later? It's an eternal, never-ending search, actually, which is very exciting. It really is.
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.
It's so easy for propaganda to work, and dissent to be mocked.
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 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.
The past is what you remember, imagine you remember, convince yourself you remember, or pretend you remember.
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.
One's life has many compartments.
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.
Cricket, the whole thing, playing, watching, being part of the Gaieties, has been a central feature of my life.
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.
Quite simply, my writing life has been one of relish, challenge, excitement.