Quotes from 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.

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

I also found being called Sir rather silly.

I don't make judgments about my own work, and I don't analyze it; I just let it happen. That applies to everything I've done.

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

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 that NATO is itself a war criminal.

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

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 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.

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.

Analysis I take to be a scientific procedure. What I do is creative. It doesn't spring from the same part of the mind.

Things like Abu Ghraib and even Guantanamo are not new things: there are many precedents.

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.

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

If only I could get down to Sidcup! I've been waiting for the weather to break. He's got my papers, this man I left them with, it's got it all down there, I could prove everything.

The earth's about five million years old, at least. Who can afford to live in the past?

I think that NATO is itself a war criminal.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.