Top 127 Quotes & Sayings by Harold Pinter

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an English dramatist Harold Pinter.

Last updated on September 17, 2024.

Harold Pinter was a British playwright, screenwriter, director and actor. A Nobel Prize winner, Pinter was one of the most influential modern British dramatists with a writing career that spanned more than 50 years. His best-known plays include The Birthday Party (1957), The Homecoming (1964), and Betrayal (1978), each of which he adapted for the screen. His screenplay adaptations of others' works include The Servant (1963), The Go-Between (1971), The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), The Trial (1993), and Sleuth (2007). He also directed or acted in radio, stage, television, and film productions of his own and others' works.

English - Dramatist | Born: October 10, 1930

Source: Wikipedia

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.

Harold Pinter

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

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

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

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

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

This particular nurse said, Cancer cells are those which have forgotten how to die. I was so struck by this statement.

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 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 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 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

I think it is the responsibility of a citizen of any country to say what he thinks.

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

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

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

I ought not to speak about the dead because the dead are all over the place.

Harold Pinter

Apart from the known and the unknown, what else is there?

Harold Pinter

I also found being called Sir rather silly.

Harold Pinter

It was difficult being a conscientious objector in the 1940's, but I felt I had to stick to my guns.

Harold Pinter

One way of looking at speech is to say it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness.

Harold Pinter

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.

Harold Pinter

I've never been able to understand what they mean by 'Pinteresque,'. I'm sure it's indefinable.

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 past is what you remember, imagine you remember, convince yourself you remember, or pretend you remember.

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

I think that NATO is itself a war criminal.

Harold Pinter

Cricket, the whole thing, playing, watching, being part of the Gaieties, has been a central feature of my life.

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

I believe an international criminal court is very much to be desired.

Harold Pinter

My first play was 'The Room', written when I was twenty-seven.

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

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.

Harold Pinter

A short piece of work means as much to me as a long piece of work.

Harold Pinter

The only theatre I ever saw was Shakespeare.

Harold Pinter

Sometimes you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost.

Harold Pinter

Iraq is just a symbol of the attitude of western democracies to the rest of the world.

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

I certainly feel sad about the alienation from my son.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Only by the sweat of my own brow. I am a totally working man.

Harold Pinter

Beckett had an unerring light on things, which I much appreciated.

Harold Pinter

All that happens is that the destruction of human beings - unless they're Americans - is called collateral damage.

Harold Pinter

Most of the press is in league with government, or with the status quo.

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

One's life has many compartments.

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

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

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

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

It's so easy for propaganda to work, and dissent to be mocked.

Harold Pinter

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Harold Pinter

There are some good rules and there are some lousy rules.

Harold Pinter

One is and is not in the centre of the maelstrom of it all.

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

Top 127 Quotes & Sayings by Harold Pinter

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