Harold Pinter Quotes

49 Sourced Quotes

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.

Harold Pinter
The speech we hear is an indication of that which we don't hear. It is a necessary avoidance, a violent, sly, and anguished or mocking smoke screen which keeps the other in its true place. When true silence falls we are left with echo but are nearer nakedness. One way of looking at speech is to say that it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness.

Harold Pinter
But the real truth is that there never is any such thing as one truth to be found in dramatic art. There are many. These truths challenge each other, recoil from each other, reflect each other, ignore each other, tease each other, are blind to each other. Sometimes you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost.

Harold Pinter
It comes easily for the English people to mock. It's a very odd situation indeed in England; you try to address real facts of life that surround you and are treated with great hostility.

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

Harold Pinter
Praise the Lord for all good things.
We blew their balls into shards of dust,
Into shards of fucking dust.
We did it.
Now I want you to come over here and kiss me on the mouth.

Harold Pinter
I mean, if a thing works, if a thing is right, respect that, acknowledge it, respect it and hold to it.

Harold Pinter
You're nothing else but a wild animal, when you come down to it. You're a barbarian. And to put the old tin lid on it, you stink from arse-hole to breakfast time.

Harold Pinter
The government of the US has no moral authority to elect itself as the judge over human rights in Cuba, where there has not been a single case of disappearance, torture or extra-judicial execution since 1959, and where despite the economic blockade, there are levels of health, education and culture that are internationally recognised.

Harold Pinter
I saw Len Hutton in his prime,
Another time, another time.

Harold Pinter
I tend to believe that cricket is the greatest thing that God ever created on earth.

Harold Pinter
I suggest that US foreign policy can still be defined as "kiss my ass or I'll kick your head in." But of course it doesn't put it like that. It talks of "low intensity conflict..."
What all this adds up to is a disease at the very centre of language, so that language becomes a permanent masquerade, a tapestry of lies.

Harold Pinter
When we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move a millimetre and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror — for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us.
I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.
If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us — the dignity of man.

Harold Pinter
Question: But what would you say your plays were about, Mr. Pinter?
Pinter: The weasel under the cocktail cabinet.

Harold Pinter
When you lead a life of scholarship you can't be bothered with the humorous realities, you know, tits, that kind of thing.

Harold Pinter
The U.S. is really beyond reason now. It is beyond our imagining to know what they are going to do next and what they are prepared to do. There is only one comparison: Nazi Germany... Nazi Germany wanted total domination of Europe and they nearly did it. The U.S. wants total domination of the world and is about to consolidate that...
Blair sees himself as a representative of moral rectitude. He is actually a mass murderer. But we forget that — we are as much victims of delusions as Americans are.

Harold Pinter
The atrocity in New York was predictable and inevitable. It was an act of retaliation against constant and systematic manifestations of state terrorism on the part of the United States over many years, in all parts of the world.
I believe that it will do this not only to take control of Iraqi oil, but also because the American administration is now a blood-thirsty wild animal.

Harold Pinter
Rationality went down the drain donkey's years ago and hasn't been seen since.

Harold Pinter
When the storm is over and night falls and the moon is out in all its glory and all you're left with is the rhythm of the sea, of the waves, you know what God intended for the human race, you know what paradise is.

Harold Pinter
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.

Harold Pinter
I don't give a damn what other people think. It's entirely their own business. I'm not writing for other people.

Harold Pinter
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.

Harold Pinter
I would never use obscene language in the office. Certainly not. I kept my obscene language for the home, where it belongs.

Harold Pinter
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.

Harold Pinter
Language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction, a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which might give way under you... at any time.

Harold Pinter
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?

Harold Pinter
I have never been loved. From this I derive my strength.

Harold Pinter
In Cuba I have always understood harsh treatment of dissenting voices as stemming from a "siege situation" imposed upon it from outside. And I believe that to a certain extent that is true.

Harold Pinter
A writer's life is a highly vulnerable, almost naked activity. We don't have to weep about that. The writer makes his choice and is stuck with it. But it is true to say that you are open to all the winds, some of them icy indeed. You are out on your own, out on a limb. You find no shelter, no protection — unless you lie — in which case of course you have constructed your own protection and, it could be argued, become a politician.

Harold Pinter
The earth's about five million years old, at least. Who can afford to live in the past?

Harold Pinter