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
I think it is the responsibility of a citizen of any country to say what he thinks.
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 think that NATO is itself a war criminal.
I don't give a damn what other people think. It's entirely their own business. I'm not writing for other people.
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 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.
I never think of myself as wise. I think of myself as possessing a critical intelligence which I intend to allow to operate.
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 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.
I found that to emerge from a personal nightmare was to enter an infinitely more pervasive public nightmare the nightmare of American hysteria, ignorance, arrogance, stupidity and belligerence; the most powerful nation the world has ever known effectively waging war against the rest of the world.
Mr. Bush and his gang do know what they're doing, and Blair, unless he really is the deluded idiot he often appears to be, also knows what they're doing.
I feel quite overwhelmed. I had absolutely no idea.
I mean, don't forget the earth's about five thousand million years old, at least. Who can afford to live in the past?
We believe in freedom. So does God. I am not a dictator. He is. I am not a barbarian. He is. And he is. They all are. I possess moral authority. You see this fist? This is my moral authority.