Harold Pinter Quotes

I also found being called Sir rather silly.

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

Stan, don't let them tell you what to do!

I no longer feel banished from myself.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

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.

Rationality went down the drain donkey's years ago and hasn't been seen since.

You wouldn't understand my works. You wouldn't have the faintest idea of what they were about. You wouldn't appreciate the points of reference. You're way behind. All of you. There's no point in sending you my works. You'd be lost. It's nothing to do with a question of intelligence. It's a way of being able to look at the world. It's a question of how far you can operate on things and not in things. I mean it's a question of your capacity to ally the two, to relate the two, to balance the two. To see, to be able to see! I'm the one who can see. That's why I can write my critical works. Might do you good ... have a look at them ... see how certain people can view ... things ... how certain people can maintain ... intellectual equilibrium. Intellectual equilibrium. You're just objects. You just ... move about. I can observe it. I can see what you do. It's the same as I do. But you're lost in it. You won't get me being ... I won't be lost in it.

If you have only one of something you can't say it's the best of anything.

What sound was that?
I turn away, into the shaking room.
What was that sound that came in on the dark?
What is this maze of light it leaves us in?
What is this stance we take,
To turn away and then turn back?
What did we hear?
It was the breath we took when we first met.
Listen. It is here.

JERRY: I was best man at your wedding. I saw you in white. I watched you glide by in white.
EMMA: I wasn't in white.
JERRY: You know what should have happened?
EMMA: What?
JERRY: I should have had you, in your white, before the wedding. I should have blackened you, in your white wedding dress, blackened you in your bridal dress, before ushering you into your wedding, as your best man.

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.

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

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

The majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lies. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.

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.

I mean, don't forget the earth's about five thousand million years old, at least. Who can afford to live in the past?

I sometimes wish desperately that I could write like someone else, be someone else. No one particularly. Just if I could put the pen down on paper and suddenly come out in a totally different way.

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.

How can the unknown merit reverence?

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.

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.

I hate brandy...it stinks of modern literature.

The more acute the experience, the less articulate its expression.

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.

The Companion of Honour I regarded as an award from the country for 50 years of work - which I thought was okay.

In Cuba I have always understood harsh treatment of dissenting voices as stemming from a "siege situation" imposed upon it from outside. And I believe that to a certain extent that is true.

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?

EMMA It was never intended to be the same kind of home. Was it? Pause. You didn't ever see it as a home, in any sense, did you? JERRY No, I saw it as a flat . . . you know. EMMA For fucking. JERRY No, for loving. EMMA Well, there's not much of that left, is there? Silence. JERRY I don't think we don't love each other. Pause. EMMA

what are you but a corpse waiting to be washed?

I can't believe that what anyone is at this moment saying has ever happened has never happened. Nothing has ever happened. Nothing. This is the only thing that has ever happened.

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

Referees are the law. They have a whistle. They blow it. And that whistle is the articulation of God's justice.

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

I don't write with any audience in mind. I just write. I take a chance on the audience. That's what I did originally, and I think it's worked
in the sense that I find there is an audience.

Occasionally it does hit me, the words on a page. And I still love doing that, as I have for the last 60 years.

The crimes of the U.S. throughout the world have been systematic, constant, clinical, remorseless, and fully documented but nobody talks about them.

As a writer you're holding a dog. You let the dog run about. But you finally can pull him back. Finally, I'm in control. But the great excitement is to see what happens if you let the whole thing go. And the dog or the character really runs about, bites everyone in sight, jumps up trees, falls into lakes, gets wet, and you let that happen. That's the excitement of writing plays-to allow the thing to be free but still hold the final leash.

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'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.

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

JERRY: Look at the way you're looking at me. I can't wait for you. I'm bowled over, I'm totally knocked out, you dazzle me, you jewel, my jewel, I can't ever sleep again, no, listen, it's the truth, I won't walk, I'll be a cripple, I'll descend, I'll diminish, into total paralysis, my life is in your hands, that's what you're banishing me to, a state of catatonia, do you know the state of catatonia? do you? do you? the state of ... where the reigning prince is the prince of emptiness, the prince of absence, the prince of desolation. I love you.
EMMA: My husband is at the other side of that door.
JERRY: Everyone knows. The world knows. It knows. But they'll never know, they'll never know, they're in a different world. I adore you. I'm madly in love with you. I can't believe that what anyone is at this moment saying has ever happened has ever happened. Nothing has ever happened. Nothing. Your eyes kill me. I'm lost. You're wonderful.

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

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

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.

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

When you lead a life of scholarship you can't be bothered with the humorous realities, you know, tits, that kind of thing.

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.

Watching first nights, though I've seen quite a few by now, is never any better. It's a nerve-racking experience. It's not a question of whether the play goes well or badly. It's not the audience reaction, it's my reaction. I'm rather hostile toward audiences-I don't much care for large bodies of people collected together. Everyone knows that audiences vary enormously; it's a mistake to care too much about them. The thing one should be concerned with is whether the performance has expressed what one set out to express in writing the play. It sometimes does.

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.

If Milosevic is to be tried, he has to be tried by a proper court, an impartial, properly constituted court which has international respect.

Isn't it true that every aristocrat wants to die?

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?

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

Sometimes I think I have always been sitting like this. I sometimes think I have always been sitting like this, alone by an indifferent fire, curtains closed, night, winter.

I know little of women. But I've heard dread tales.

It's very difficult to feel contempt for others when you see yourself in the mirror.

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

I think that NATO is itself a war criminal.

I mean, if a thing works, if a thing is right, respect that, acknowledge it, respect it and hold to it.

Listen. You know what it's like when you're in a room with the light on and then suddenly the light goes out? I'll show you. It's like this.
He turns out the light.
BLACKOUT

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

There are some things one remembers even though they may never have happened.

The weasel under the cocktail cabinet.