Harold Pinter Quotes

49 Sourced Quotes

I hate despair. I find it intolerable. The stink of it gets up my nose. It's a blemish. Despair, old fruit, is a cancer. It should be castrated. Indeed I've often found that that works. Chop the balls off and despair goes out the window.

Harold Pinter
Each play was, for me, 'a different kind of failure.' And that fact, I suppose, sent me on to write the next one.

Harold Pinter
I said to this monk... I heard you got a stock of shoes here. Piss off, he said to me.

Harold Pinter
We have heard many times that tired, grimy phrase: 'Failure of communication...' and this phrase has been fixed to my work quite consistently. I believe the contrary. I think that we communicate only too well, in our silence, in what is unsaid, and that what takes place is a continual evasion, desperate rear-guard attempts to keep ourselves to ourselves. Communication is too alarming. To enter into someone else's life is too frightening. To disclose the poverty within us is too fearsome a possibility.

Harold Pinter
The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law. The invasion was an arbitrary military action inspired by a series of lies upon lies and gross manipulation of the media and therefore of the public; an act intended to consolidate American military and economic control of the Middle East masquerading — as a last resort — all other justifications having failed to justify themselves — as liberation.

Harold Pinter
That the torturers listen to music and are very kind to their children has been well established throughout twentieth-century history. This is one of the very complex states of affairs in the psychology of our social and political lives.

Harold Pinter
So often, below the word spoken, is the thing known and unspoken. My characters tell me so much and no more, with reference to their experience, their aspirations, their motives, their history. Between my lack of biographical data about them and the ambiguity of what they say lies a territory which is not only worthy of exploration but which it is compulsory to explore.

Harold Pinter
There are places in my heart...where no living soul...has...or can ever...trespass.

Harold Pinter
You are in no man's land. Which never moves, which never changes, which never grows older, but which remains forever, icy and silent.

Harold Pinter
It's a strange moment, the moment of creating characters who up to that moment have had no existence. What follows is fitful, uncertain, even hallucinatory, although sometimes it can be an unstoppable avalanche. The author's position is an odd one. In a sense he is not welcomed by his characters. They resist him, they are not easy to live with.

Harold Pinter
Now hear this. You are mountain people. You hear me? Your language is dead. It is forbidden. It is not permitted to speak your mountain language in this place.

Harold Pinter
Nothing is more sterile or lamentable than the man content to live within himself.

Harold Pinter
The more acute the experience, the less articulate its expression.

Harold Pinter
The US is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be, but it's also very smart. As a salesman it's out on its own. And its most saleable commodity is self-love. The US has actually educated itself to be in love with itself.

Harold Pinter
You have to look very carefully at your motives if you become a public figure. The danger is that you become an exhibitionist, self-important, pompous... Before you know where you are you're having make-up put on, your eyelashes are being tinted.

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

Harold Pinter
I know the place. It is true. Everything we do Corrects the space Between death and me And you.

Harold Pinter
If only I could get down to Sidcup! I've been waiting for the weather to break. He's got my papers, this man I left them with, it's got it all down there, I could prove everything.

Harold Pinter
I believe his arrest and detention by the international criminal tribunal is unconstitutional, and goes against Yugoslav and international law. They have no right to try him.

Harold Pinter