Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Cricket, the whole thing, playing, watching, being part of the Gaieties, has been a central feature of my life.
Sometimes you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost.
Occasionally it does hit me, the words on a page. And I still love doing that, as I have for the last 60 years.
Referees are the law. They have a whistle. They blow it. And that whistle is the articulation of God's justice.
I don't give a damn what other people think. It's entirely their own business. I'm not writing for other people.
The Companion of Honour I regarded as an award from the country for 50 years of work - which I thought was okay.
All that happens is that the destruction of human beings - unless they're Americans - is called collateral damage.
I mean, don't forget the earth's about five thousand million years old, at least. Who can afford to live in the past?
This particular nurse said, Cancer cells are those which have forgotten how to die. I was so struck by this statement.
Analysis I take to be a scientific procedure. What I do is creative. It doesn't spring from the same part of the mind.
Quite often, I have a compelling sense of how a role should be played. And I'm proved - equally as often - quite wrong.
I don't idealise women. I enjoy them. I have been married to two of the most independent women it is possible to think of.
When you lead a life of scholarship you can't be bothered with the humorous realities, you know, tits, that kind of thing.
All I can say is that I did admire 'The Lives of Others', which I thought was really about something and beautifully done.
I would never use obscene language in the office. Certainly not. I kept my obscene language for the home, where it belongs.
I never think of myself as wise. I think of myself as possessing a critical intelligence which I intend to allow to operate.
I don't make judgments about my own work, and I don't analyze it; I just let it happen. That applies to everything I've done.
I find the whole Blairish idea more and more repugnant every day. 'New Labour': the term itself is so trashy. Kind of ersatz.
I was brought up in the War. I was an adolescent in the Second World War. And I did witness in London a great deal of the Blitz.
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.
I could be a bit of a pain in the arse. Since I've come out of my cancer, I must say I intend to be even more of a pain in the arse.
The whole brunt of the media and the government is to encourage people to be highly competitive and totally selfish and uncaring of others.
If Milosevic is to be tried, he has to be tried by a proper court, an impartial, properly constituted court which has international respect.
The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law.
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.
Language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction, a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which might give way under you ... at any time.
Clinton's hands remain incredibly clean, don't they, and Tony Blair's smile remains as wide as ever. I view these guises with profound contempt.
I tend to think that cricket is the greatest thing that God ever created on earth - certainly greater than sex, although sex isn't too bad either.
You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good.
The crimes of the U.S. throughout the world have been systematic, constant, clinical, remorseless, and fully documented but nobody talks about them.
I don't intend to simply go away and write my plays and be a good boy. I intend to remain an independent and political intelligence in my own right.
As far as I'm concerned, 'The Caretaker' is funny up to a point. Beyond that, it ceases to be funny, and it was because of that point that I wrote it.
I do tend to think that I've written a great deal out of my unconscious because half the time I don't know what a given character is going to say next.
My second play, The Birthday Party, I wrote in 1958 - or 1957. It was totally destroyed by the critics of the day, who called it an absolute load of rubbish.
A few friends and me used to go and watch Bunuel, Carne, Cocteau... Cocteau and Bunuel were surrealism. And I was very excited by that. 'Un Chien Andalou', especially.
I'm always the interrogator. When I was an actor in rep, I always played sinister parts. The directors always said, 'If there's a nasty man about, cast Harold Pinter.'
There is a movement to get an international criminal court in the world, voted for by hundreds of states-but with the noticeable absence of the United States of America.
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?
Truth in drama is forever elusive. You never quite find it, but the search for it is compulsive. The search is clearly what drives the endeavour. The search is your task.
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 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.
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.
No one wanted me to be a conscientious objector. My parents certainly didn't want it. My teacher and mentor, Joe Brearley, didn't want it. My friends didn't want it. I was alone.
I'm well aware that I have been described in some quarters as being 'enigmatic, taciturn, prickly, explosive and forbidding'. Well, I have my moods like anyone else; I won't deny it.
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.
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.
George W. Bush is always protesting that he has the fate of the world in mind and bangs on about the 'freedom-loving peoples' he's seeking to protect. I'd love to meet a freedom-hating people.
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.
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 wrote 'The Room', 'The Birthday Party', and 'The Dumb Waiter' in 1957, I was acting all the time in a repertory company, doing all kinds of jobs, traveling to Bournemouth and Torquay and Birmingham.