Harold Pinter CH CBE was a British playwright, screenwriter, director and actor. A Nobel Prize winner, Pinter was one of the most influential modern British dramatists with a writing career that spanned more than 50 years. His best-known plays include The Birthday Party (1957), The Homecoming (1964), and Betrayal (1978), each of which he adapted for the screen. His screenplay adaptations of others’ works include The Servant (1963), The Go-Between (1971), The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981), The Trial (1993), and Sleuth (2007). He also directed or acted in radio, stage, television, and film productions of his own and others’ works. Pinter was born and raised in Hackney, east London, and educated at Hackney Downs School. He was a sprinter and a keen cricket player, acting in school plays and writing poetry. He attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art but did not complete the course. He was fined for refusing national service as a conscientious objector. Subsequently, he continued training at the Central School of Speech and Drama and worked in repertory theatre in Ireland and England. In 1956 he married actress Vivien Merchant and had a son, Daniel, born in 1958. He left Merchant in 1975 and married author Lady Antonia Fraser in 1980. Pinter’s career as a playwright began with a production of The Room in 1957. His second play, The Birthday Party, closed after eight performances, but was enthusiastically reviewed by critic Harold Hobson. His early works were described by critics as “comedy of menace”. May these Harold Pinter Quotes On Success inspire you to take action so that you may live your dreams.
1. “It’s so easy for propaganda to work, and dissent to be mocked.” Harold Pinter
2. “One’s life has many compartments.” Harold Pinter
3. “Don’t forget the earth’s about five thousand million years old, at least. Who can afford to live in the past?” Harold Pinter
4. “I know little of women. But I’ve heard dread tales.” Harold Pinter
5. “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.” Harold Pinter
6. “I don’t give a damn what other people think. It’s entirely their own business. I’m not writing for other people.” Harold Pinter
7. “All that happens is that the destruction of human beings, unless they’re Americans, is called collateral damage.” Harold Pinter
8. “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
9. “How can the unknown merit reverence?” Harold Pinter
10. “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.” Harold Pinter
11. “As a writer you’re holding a dog. You let the dog run about. But you finally can pull him back. Finally, I’m in control. But the great excitement is to see what happens if you let the whole thing go. And the dog or the character really runs about, bites everyone in sight, jumps up trees, falls into lakes, gets wet, and you let that happen. That’s the excitement of writing plays-to allow the thing to be free but still hold the final leash.” Harold Pinter
12. “This particular nurse said, Cancer cells are those which have forgotten how to die. I was so struck by this statement.” Harold Pinter
13. “I think we communicate only too well, in our silence, in what is unsaid, and that what takes place is a continual evasion, desperate rearguard attempts to keep ourselves to ourselves. Communication is too alarming. To enter into someone else’s life is too frightening. To disclose to others the poverty within us is too fearsome a possibility.” Harold Pinter
14. “Sometimes you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost.” Harold Pinter
15. “There are places in my heart, where no living soul, has, or can ever, trespass.” Harold Pinter
16. “I’ll tell you what I really think about politicians. The other night I watched some politicians on television talking about Vietnam. I wanted very much to burst through the screen with a flame thrower and burn their eyes out and their balls off and then inquire from them how they would assess the action from a political point of view.” Harold Pinter
17. “The past is what you remember, imagine you remember, convince yourself you remember, or pretend you remember.” Harold Pinter
18. “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
19. “Apart from the known and the unknown, what else is there?” Harold Pinter
20. “The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law.” Harold Pinter
21. “No matter how you look at it, all the emotions connected with love are not really immortal, like all other passions in life, they are bound to fade at some point. The trick is to convert love into some lasting friendship that overcomes the fading passion.” Harold Pinter
22. “Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.” Harold Pinter
23. “Do the structures of language and the structures of reality (by which I mean what actually happens) move along parallel lines? Does reality essentially remain outside language, separate, obdurate, alien, not susceptible to description? Is an accurate and vital correspondence between what is and our perception of it impossible? Or is it that we are obliged to use language only in order to obscure and distort reality , to distort what happens — because we fear it?” Harold Pinter
24. “There are some things one remembers even though they may never have happened.” Harold Pinter
25. “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
26. “Language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction, a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which might give way under you, at any time.” Harold Pinter
27. “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
28. “I thought the plays would speak for themselves. But they didn’t.” Harold Pinter
29. “The speech we hear is an indication of that which we don’t hear. It is a necessary avoidance, a violent, sly, and anguished or mocking smoke screen which keeps the other in its true place. When true silence falls we are left with echo but are nearer nakedness. One way of looking at speech is to say that it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness.” Harold Pinter
30. “I think that Nato is itself a war criminal.” Harold Pinter
31. “The more acute the experience, the less articulate its expression.” Harold Pinter
32. “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
33. “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.” Harold Pinter
34. “When the storm is over and night falls and the moon is out in all its glory and all you’re left with is the rhythm of the sea, of the waves, you know what God intended for the human race, you know what paradise is.” Harold Pinter
35. “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.” Harold Pinter
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