Harold Pinter Quotes

30 quotations by 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

One's life has many compartments.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

I really believe that Clinton and Blair should be arraigned as war criminals. They justified Serbia by talking about humanitarian intervention. And that kind of crap I think we've had enough of.

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

I never think of myself as wise. I think of myself as possessing a critical intelligence which I intend to allow to operate.

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 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 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 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.

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

I also found being called Sir rather silly.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

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.

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

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

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