Harold Pinter quotes

Harold Pinter was a British playwright, screenwriter, director, and actor, renowned for his distinctive style and influential plays. His works often explore themes of power, silence, and the complexity of human relationships. He received many prestigious awards and became one of the most significant dramatists of the 20th century. Here are 66 of his 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 past is what you remember, imagine you remember, convince yourself you remember, or pretend you remember.

Harold Pinter

It's very difficult to feel contempt for others when you see yourself in the mirror.

Harold Pinter

I hate brandy...it stinks of modern literature.

Harold Pinter

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

Harold Pinter

I can't really articulate what I feel.

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

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

Harold Pinter

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

Harold Pinter

Iraq is just a symbol of the attitude of western democracies to the rest of the world.

Harold Pinter

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.

Harold Pinter

I ought not to speak about the dead because the dead are all over the place.

Harold Pinter

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

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

I mean, don't forget the earth's about five thousand million years old, at least. Who can afford to live in the past?

Harold Pinter

It's a scintillating stratagem. Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words 'the American people' provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don't need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it's very comfortable.

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

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

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

I never think of myself as wise. I think of myself as possessing a critical intelligence which I intend to allow to operate.

Harold Pinter

The crimes of the U.S. throughout the world have been systematic, constant, clinical, remorseless, and fully documented but nobody talks about them.

Harold Pinter

One's life has many compartments.

Harold Pinter