Best 73 quotes of Harold Pinter on MyQuotes

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

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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

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?

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

How can the unknown merit reverence? In other words how can you revere that of which you are ignorant? At the same time, it would be ridiculous to propose that what we know merits reverence. What we know merits any one of a number of things, but it stands to reason reverence isn't one of them. In other words, apart from the known and the unknown, what else is there?

I also found being called Sir rather silly.

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

I believe the US is a truly monstrous force in the world, now off the leash for obvious reasons.

I can't really articulate what I feel.

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 don't give a damn what other people think. It's entirely their own business. I'm not writing for other people.

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 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 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 hate brandy...it stinks of modern literature.

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

I know the place. It is true. Everything we do Corrects the space Between death and me And you.

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.

I'm not committed as a writer, in the usual sense of the term, either religiously or politically. And I'm not conscious of any particular social function. I write because I want to write. I don't see any placards on myself, and I don't carry any banners.

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.

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

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

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

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.

I suggest that US foreign policy can still be defined as "kiss my ass or I'll kick your head in." But of course it doesn't put it like that. It talks of "low intensity conflict..." What all this adds up to is a disease at the very centre of language, so that language becomes a permanent masquerade, a tapestry of lies.

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.

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

I think that NATO is itself a war criminal.

I think we communicate only too well, in our silence, in what is unsaid, and that what takes place is a continual evasion, desperate rearguard attempts to keep ourselves to ourselves. Communication is too alarming. To enter into someone else's life is too frightening. To disclose to others the poverty within us is too fearsome a possibility.

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

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

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

I've had my fill of these city guttersnipes--all that scavenging scum! They're the sort of people, who, if the gates of heaven opened to them, all they'd feel would be a draught.

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 would never use obscene language in the office. Certainly not. I kept my obscene language for the home, where it belongs.

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.

Language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction, a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which might give way under you ... at any time.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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