Harold Pinter Quotes
Harold Pinter Quotes
- 1
A short piece of work means as much to me as a long piece of work.
Harold Pinter | top
- 2
All that happens is that the destruction of human beings - unless they're Americans - is called collateral damage.
Harold Pinter | top
- 3
Apart from the known and the unknown, what else is there?
Harold Pinter | top
- 4
Beckett had an unerring light on things, which I much appreciated.
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- 5
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 | top
- 6
Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.
Harold Pinter | top
- 7
I also found being called Sir rather silly.
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- 8
I believe an international criminal court is very much to be desired.
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- 9
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 | top
- 10
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.
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- 11
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.
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- 12
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.
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- 13
I mean, don't forget the earth's about five thousand million years old, at least. Who can afford to live in the past?
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- 14
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 | top
- 15
I ought not to speak about the dead because the dead are all over the place.
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- 16
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.
Harold Pinter | top
- 17
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.
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- 18
I think it is the responsibility of a citizen of any country to say what he thinks.
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- 19
I think that NATO is itself a war criminal.
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- 20
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 | top
- 21
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 | top
- 22
Iraq is just a symbol of the attitude of western democracies to the rest of the world.
Harold Pinter | top
- 23
It was difficult being a conscientious objector in the 1940's, but I felt I had to stick to my guns.
Harold Pinter | top
- 24
It's so easy for propaganda to work, and dissent to be mocked.
Harold Pinter | top
- 25
Most of the press is in league with government, or with the status quo.
Harold Pinter | top
- 26
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.
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- 27
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 | top
- 28
One is and is not in the centre of the maelstrom of it all.
Harold Pinter | top
- 29
One way of looking at speech is to say it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness.
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- 30
One's life has many compartments.
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- 31
The Companion of Honour I regarded as an award from the country for 50 years of work - which I thought was okay.
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- 32
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 | top
- 33
The past is what you remember, imagine you remember, convince yourself you remember, or pretend you remember.
Harold Pinter | top
- 34
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.
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- 35
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 | top
- 36
There are some good rules and there are some lousy rules.
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- 37
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.
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- 38
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 | top
- 39
This particular nurse said, Cancer cells are those which have forgotten how to die. I was so struck by this statement.
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- 40
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.
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