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
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.
Isn't it true that every aristocrat wants to die?
I found the offer of a knighthood something that I couldn't possibly accept. I found it to be somehow squalid, a knighthood. There's a relationship to government about knights.
How can the unknown merit reverence? In other words how can you revere that of which you are ignorant? At the same time, it would be ridiculous to propose that what we know merits reverence. What we know merits any one of a number of things, but it stands to reason reverence isn't one of them. In other words, apart from the known and the unknown, what else is there?
I've had my fill of these city guttersnipes--all that scavenging scum! They're the sort of people, who, if the gates of heaven opened to them, all they'd feel would be a draught.
There are some good rules and there are some lousy rules.
Nothing is more sterile or lamentable than the man content to live within himself.
One is and is not in the centre of the maelstrom of it all.
If Milosevic is to be tried, he has to be tried by a proper court, an impartial, properly constituted court which has international respect.
I ought not to speak about the dead because the dead are all over the place.
One way of looking at speech is to say it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness.
I think it is the responsibility of a citizen of any country to say what he thinks.
There's a tradition in British intellectual life of mocking any non-political force that gets involved in politics, especially within the sphere of the arts and the theatre.
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.