Harold Pinter

Only by the sweat of my own brow. I am a totally working man.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

One's life has many compartments.

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

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.

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.

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

Quite simply, my writing life has been one of relish, challenge, excitement.

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 think that NATO is itself a war criminal.

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 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 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.

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.

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

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.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

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

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

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

Truth in drama is forever elusive. You never quite find it, but the search for it is compulsive. The search is clearly what drives the endeavour. The search is your task.

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

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.

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

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.

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.