A biography for Harold Pinterhasn’t been written yet.
“Things like Abu Ghraib and even Guantanamo are not new things: there are many precedents.”
“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.”
“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.”
“There are some good rules and there are some lousy rules.”
“I do tend to think that I've written a great deal out of my unconscious because half the time I don't know what a given character is going to say next.”
“I've said it before, and I'll say it again. I've written 29 damn plays. Isn't that enough?”
“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.”
“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.”
“All that happens is that the destruction of human beings - unless they're Americans - is called collateral damage.”
“I ought not to speak about the dead because the dead are all over the place.”
“As it is?”
“While The United States is the most powerful nation the world has ever seen, it is also the most detested nation that the world has ever known.”
“I find the whole Blairish idea more and more repugnant every day. 'New Labour': the term itself is so trashy. Kind of ersatz.”
“I certainly feel sad about the alienation from my son.”
“There was one man in the Labour government, Robin Cook, whom I had a very high regard for. He had the courage to speak out and to resign over Iraq. He was an admirable man. But resignation over a matter of principle is not a very fashionable thing in our society.”
“One's life has many compartments.”
“There is a movement to get an international criminal court in the world, voted for by hundreds of states-but with the noticeable absence of the United States of America.”
“One way of looking at speech is to say it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness.”
“I used to get up at five in the morning and play cricket.”
“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.”