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
How can the unknown merit reverence?
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.
I would never use obscene language in the office. Certainly not. I kept my obscene language for the home, where it belongs.
I saw Len Hutton in his prime, Another time, another time.
The theater's much the most difficult kind of writing for me, the most naked kind, you're so entirely restricted.... I find myself stuck with these characters who are either sitting or standing, and they've either got to walk out of a door, or come in through a door, and that's about all they can do.
Most of the press is in league with government, or with the status quo.
A short piece of work means as much to me as a long piece of work.
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.
One is and is not in the centre of the maelstrom of it all.
Isn't it true that every aristocrat wants to die?
It's so easy for propaganda to work, and dissent to be mocked.
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?
One way of looking at speech is to say it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness.
I mean, don't forget the earth's about five thousand million years old, at least. Who can afford to live in the past?