Harold Pinter Quotes

Here, we’ve compiled a list of the best Harold Pinter Quotes. The wide variety of quotes available makes it possible to find a quote to suit your needs. You’ve likely heard some of the Harold Pinter Quotes before, but that’s because they truly are great.

1
I mean, don't forget the earth's about five thousand mi

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
2
Cricket, the whole thing, playing, watching, being part of the Gaieties, has been a central feature of my life.
Harold Pinter
3
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
4
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. I’ve written 29 damn plays. Isn’t that enough?
Harold Pinter
5
I’ve never been able to understand what they mean by ‘Pinteresque,’. I’m sure it’s indefinable.
Harold Pinter
6
One is and is not in the centre of the maelstrom of it all.
Harold Pinter
7
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
8
All that happens is that the destruction of human beingsunless they’re Americans – is called collateral damage.
Harold Pinter
9
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.
Harold Pinter
10
The only theatre I ever saw was Shakespeare.
Harold Pinter
11
I always start a play by calling the characters A, B, and C.
Harold Pinter
12
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.
Harold Pinter
13
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!
Harold Pinter
14
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
15
Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.
Harold Pinter
16
Apart from the known and the unknown, what else is there?
Harold Pinter
17
The Companion of Honour I regarded as an award from the country for 50 years of work – which I thought was okay.
Harold Pinter
18
A short piece of work means as much to me as a long piece of work.
Harold Pinter
19
Iraq is just a symbol of the attitude of western democracies to the rest of the world.
Harold Pinter
20
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.
Harold Pinter
21
The effect of depleted uranium, used by America in the Gulf War, is never referred to.
Harold Pinter
22
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
23
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
24
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
25
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.’
Harold Pinter
26
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
27
Analysis I take to be a scientific procedure. What I do is creative. It doesn’t spring from the same part of the mind.
Harold Pinter
28
Sometimes you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost.
Harold Pinter
29
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
30
I think that NATO is itself a war criminal.
Harold Pinter
31
I also found being called Sir rather silly.
Harold Pinter
32
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.
Harold Pinter
33
I used to get up at five in the morning and play cricket.
Harold Pinter
34
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
35
I think it is the responsibility of a citizen of any country to say what he thinks.
Harold Pinter
36
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
37
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
38
Beckett had an unerring light on things, which I much appreciated.
Harold Pinter
39
Things like Abu Ghraib and even Guantanamo are not new things: there are many precedents.
Harold Pinter
40
One way of looking at speech is to say it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness.
Harold Pinter
41
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.
Harold Pinter
42
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
43
The whole brunt of the media and the government is to encourage people to be highly competitive and totally selfish and uncaring of others.
Harold Pinter
44
Many Americans, we know, are horrified by the posture of their government but seem to be helpless.
Harold Pinter
45
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