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.
Harold Pinter
The past is what you remember, imagine you remember, convince yourself you remember, or pretend you remember.
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 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.
Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.
My father was a tailor. He worked from seven o'clock in the morning until seven at night. At least when he got home, my mother always cooked him a very good dinner. Lots of potatoes, I remember; he used to knock them down like a dose of salts. He needed it, after a 12-hour day.
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.
Only by the sweat of my own brow. I am a totally working man.
Apart from the known and the unknown, what else is there?
I ought not to speak about the dead because the dead are all over the place.
I mean, don't forget the earth's about five thousand million years old, at least. Who can afford to live in the past?
I think plays have nothing to do with one's own personal life. Not in my experience, anyway. The stuff of drama has to do, not with your subject matter, anyway, but with how you treat it. Drama includes pain, loss, regret - that's what drama is about!
It's so easy for propaganda to work, and dissent to be mocked.
Things like Abu Ghraib and even Guantanamo are not new things: there are many precedents.
Sometimes you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost.
A short piece of work means as much to me as a long piece of work.
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.
I've never been able to understand what they mean by 'Pinteresque,'. I'm sure it's indefinable.
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.
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.
I left school at sixteen - I was fed up and restless. The only thing that interested me at school was English language and literature, but I didn't have Latin, and so couldn't go on to university. So I went to a few drama schools, not studying seriously; I was mostly in love at the time and tied up with that.
I used to get up at five in the morning and play cricket.
Political theatre presents an entirely different set of problems. Sermonising has to be avoided at all cost. Objectivity is essential. The characters must be allowed to breathe their own air. The author cannot confine and constrict them to satisfy his own taste or disposition or prejudice.
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.
One way of looking at speech is to say it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness.
Beckett had an unerring light on things, which I much appreciated.
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 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 think it is the responsibility of a citizen of any country to say what he thinks.
I was told that, when 'Betrayal' was being produced by one of the provincial companies in England, the two actors playing those roles actually went into a pub one day and played that scene as if it were really happening to them. The people around them became very uncomfortable.
I am absolutely not saying that Milosevic might not be responsible for all sorts of atrocities, but I believe that what's been left out of public debate and the press is that there was a civil war going on there.
I always start a play by calling the characters A, B, and C.
I believe an international criminal court is very much to be desired.
One should also remember that the U.S. is the biggest exporter of torture weapons in the world, though the U.K. is not far behind in the league table. We never stopped, even under Robin Cook's supposedly ethical foreign policy.
All I can say is that I did admire 'The Lives of Others', which I thought was really about something and beautifully done.
Many Americans, we know, are horrified by the posture of their government but seem to be helpless.
This particular nurse said, Cancer cells are those which have forgotten how to die. I was so struck by this statement.
The whole brunt of the media and the government is to encourage people to be highly competitive and totally selfish and uncaring of others.
Quite often, I have a compelling sense of how a role should be played. And I'm proved - equally as often - quite wrong.
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 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.
Quite simply, my writing life has been one of relish, challenge, excitement.
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.
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.
It was difficult being a conscientious objector in the 1940's, but I felt I had to stick to my guns.
The effect of depleted uranium, used by America in the Gulf War, is never referred to.
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 also found being called Sir rather silly.
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.
