Harold Pinter
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.
The effect of depleted uranium, used by America in the Gulf War, is never referred to.
Sometimes you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost.
I think it is the responsibility of a citizen of any country to say what he thinks.
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'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.
The crimes of the U.S. throughout the world have been systematic, constant, clinical, remorseless, and fully documented but nobody talks about them.
Apart from the known and the unknown, what else is there?
One way of looking at speech is to say it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness.
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.
Beckett had an unerring light on things, which I much appreciated.
I also found being called Sir rather silly.
I believe an international criminal court is very much to be desired.
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 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 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 ought not to speak about the dead because the dead are all over the place.
If Milosevic is to be tried, he has to be tried by a proper court, an impartial, properly constituted court which has international respect.
Most of the press is in league with government, or with the status quo.
The Companion of Honour I regarded as an award from the country for 50 years of work - which I thought was okay.
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.
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.
This particular nurse said, Cancer cells are those which have forgotten how to die. I was so struck by this statement.
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.
It was difficult being a conscientious objector in the 1940's, but I felt I had to stick to my guns.
My first play was 'The Room', written when I was twenty-seven.
Quite often, I have a compelling sense of how a role should be played. And I'm proved - equally as often - quite wrong.
I've never been able to understand what they mean by 'Pinteresque,'. I'm sure it's indefinable.
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 was told that, when 'Betrayal' was being produced by one of the provincial companies in England, the two actors playing those roles actually went into a pub one day and played that scene as if it were really happening to them. The people around them became very uncomfortable.
I think we communicate only too well, in our silence, in what is unsaid, and that what takes place is a continual evasion, desperate rearguard attempts to keep ourselves to ourselves. Communication is too alarming. To enter into someone else's life is too frightening. To disclose to others the poverty within us is too fearsome a possibility.Collection: Life
When the storm is over and night falls and the moon is out in all its glory and all you're left with is the rhythm of the sea, of the waves, you know what God intended for the human race, you know what paradise is.Collection: Fall
There are some things one remembers even though they may never have happened.Collection: Truth
The speech we hear is an indication of that which we don't hear. It is a necessary avoidance, a violent, sly, and anguished or mocking smoke screen which keeps the other in its true place. When true silence falls we are left with echo but are nearer nakedness. One way of looking at speech is to say that it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness.Collection: Fall
The more acute the experience, the less articulate its expression.Collection: Expression
No matter how you look at it, all the emotions connected with love are not really immortal; like all other passions in life, they are bound to fade at some point. The trick is to convert love into some lasting friendship that overcomes the fading passion.Collection: Life
Language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction, a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which might give way under you ... at any time.Collection: Art
I suggest that US foreign policy can still be defined as "kiss my ass or I'll kick your head in." But of course it doesn't put it like that. It talks of "low intensity conflict..." What all this adds up to is a disease at the very centre of language, so that language becomes a permanent masquerade, a tapestry of lies.Collection: Lying
There never is any such thing as one truth to be found in dramatic art. There are many. These truths challenge each other, recoil from each other, reflect each other, ignore each other, tease each other, are blind to each other. Sometimes you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost.Collection: Art
There are places in my heart...where no living soul...has...or can ever...trespass.Collection: Heart
Don't forget the earth's about five thousand million years old, at least. Who can afford to live in the past?Collection: Past
I'll tell you what I really think about politicians. The other night I watched some politicians on television talking about Vietnam. I wanted very much to burst through the screen with a flame thrower and burn their eyes out and their balls off and then inquire from them how they would assess the action from a political point of view.Collection: Eye
Be careful how you talk about God. He's the only God we have. If you let him go he won't come back. He won't even look back over his shoulder. And then what will you do?Collection: Looks
A writer's life is a highly vulnerable, almost naked activity. We don't have to weep about that. The writer makes his choice and is stuck with it. But it is true to say that you are open to all the winds, some of them icy indeed. You are out on your own, out on a limb. You find no shelter, no protection - unless you lie - in which case of course you have constructed your own protection and, it could be argued, become a politician.Collection: Lying
Do the structures of language and the structures of reality (by which I mean what actually happens) move along parallel lines? Does reality essentially remain outside language, separate, obdurate, alien, not susceptible to description? Is an accurate and vital correspondence between what is and our perception of it impossible? Or is it that we are obliged to use language only in order to obscure and distort reality -- to distort what happens -- because we fear it?Collection: Moving
How can the unknown merit reverence?Collection: Merit
I don't give a damn what other people think. It's entirely their own business. I'm not writing for other people.Collection: Writing