Harold Pinter Quotes

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Harold Pinter

Profession : Dramatist

Birth : October 10, 1930

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

As far as I'm concerned, 'The Caretaker' is funny up to a point. Beyond that, it ceases to be funny, and it was because of that point that I wrote it.

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.

Harold Pinter

I wrote 'The Room', 'The Birthday Party', and 'The Dumb Waiter' in 1957, I was acting all the time in a repertory company, doing all kinds of jobs, traveling to Bournemouth and Torquay and Birmingham.

Harold Pinter

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

You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good.

Harold Pinter

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

Harold Pinter

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

My father was a tailor. He worked from seven o'clock in the morning until seven at night. At least when he got home, my mother always cooked him a very good dinner. Lots of potatoes, I remember; he used to knock them down like a dose of salts. He needed it, after a 12-hour day.

Harold Pinter

I left school at sixteen - I was fed up and restless. The only thing that interested me at school was English language and literature, but I didn't have Latin, and so couldn't go on to university. So I went to a few drama schools, not studying seriously; I was mostly in love at the time and tied up with that.

Harold Pinter

Political theatre presents an entirely different set of problems. Sermonising has to be avoided at all cost. Objectivity is essential. The characters must be allowed to breathe their own air. The author cannot confine and constrict them to satisfy his own taste or disposition or prejudice.

Harold Pinter

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

Harold Pinter

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

Harold Pinter

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

Harold Pinter

I've never been able to understand what they mean by 'Pinteresque,'. I'm sure it's indefinable.

Harold Pinter

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

Harold Pinter

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

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

Harold Pinter

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

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

Harold Pinter