Harold Pinter

Dramatist

1930-10-10

Quotes by Harold Pinter

• RUTH: If you take the glass I'll take you.

  Read quote

• There are some things one remembers even though they may never have happened.

  Read quote

• There are some things one remembers even though they may never have happened.

  Read quote

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

  Read quote

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

  Read quote

• A few friends and me used to go and watch Bunuel, Carne, Cocteau... Cocteau and Bunuel were surrealism. And I was very excited by that. 'Un Chien Andalou', especially.

  Read quote

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

  Read quote

• I'm well aware that I have been described in some quarters as being 'enigmatic, taciturn, prickly, explosive and forbidding'. Well, I have my moods like anyone else; I won't deny it.

  Read quote

• 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.

  Read quote

• 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.

  Read quote

• 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.

  Read quote

• 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.

  Read quote

• The effect of depleted uranium, used by America in the Gulf War, is never referred to.

  Read quote

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

  Read quote

• Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

  Read quote

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

  Read quote