Harold Pinter
Harold Pinter
Harold Pinter CH CBEwas a Nobel Prize-winning English playwright, screenwriter, director and actor. One of the most influential modern British dramatists, his writing career spanned more than 50 years. His best-known plays include The Birthday Party, The Homecoming, and Betrayal, each of which he adapted for the screen. His screenplay adaptations of others' works include The Servant, The Go-Between, The French Lieutenant's Woman, The Trial, and Sleuth. He also directed or acted in radio, stage, television, and film productions of...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionPlaywright
Date of Birth10 October 1930
Rationality went down the drain donkey's years ago and hasn't been seen since.
I believe the US is a truly monstrous force in the world, now off the leash for obvious reasons.
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.
I no longer feel banished from myself.
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.
The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law.
I can't really articulate what I feel,
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's life has many compartments.
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?
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.
I don't give a damn what other people think. It's entirely their own business. I'm not writing for other people.
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.
All that happens is that the destruction of human beings - unless they're Americans - is called collateral damage.