Top 70 Harold Pinter Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “It’s so easy for propaganda to work, and dissent to be mocked.”

— Harold Pinter

2. “One way of looking at speech is to say that it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness.”

— Harold Pinter

3. “Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.”

— Harold Pinter

4. “It’s very difficult to feel contempt for others when you see yourself in the mirror.”

— Harold Pinter

5. “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

6. “The more acute the experience, the less articulate its expression.”

— Harold Pinter

7. “The past is what you remember, imagine you remember, convince yourself you remember, or pretend you remember.”

— Harold Pinter

8. “How can the unknown merit reverence?”

— Harold Pinter

9. “I know the place. It is true. Everything we do Corrects the space Between death and me And you.”

— Harold Pinter

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

— Harold Pinter

11. “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

12. “Sometimes you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost.”

— Harold Pinter

13. “Rationality went down the drain donkey’s years ago and hasn’t been seen since.”

— Harold Pinter

14. “This particular nurse said, Cancer cells are those which have forgotten how to die. I was so struck by this statement.”

— Harold Pinter

15. “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

16. “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?”

— Harold Pinter

17. “Apart from the known and the unknown, what else is there?”

— Harold Pinter

18. “I think that NATO is itself a war criminal.”

— Harold Pinter

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

— Harold Pinter

20. “The Room I wrote in 1957, and I was really gratified to find that it stood up. I didn’t have to change a word.”

— Harold Pinter

21. “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.”

— Harold Pinter

22. “One is and is not in the centre of the maelstrom of it all.”

— Harold Pinter

23. “One’s life has many compartments.”

— Harold Pinter

24. “Nothing is more sterile or lamentable than the man content to live within himself.”

— Harold Pinter

25. “I would never use obscene language in the office. Certainly not. I kept my obscene language for the home, where it belongs.”

— Harold Pinter

26. “Beckett had an unerring light on things, which I much appreciated.”

— Harold Pinter

27. “I think it is the responsibility of a citizen of any country to say what he thinks.”

— Harold Pinter

28. “I’m not committed as a writer, in the usual sense of the term, either religiously or politically. And I’m not conscious of any particular social function. I write because I want to write. I don’t see any placards on myself, and I don’t carry any banners.”

— Harold Pinter

29. “Most of the press is in league with government, or with the status quo.”

— Harold Pinter

30. “I also found being called Sir rather silly.”

— Harold Pinter

31. “A short piece of work means as much to me as a long piece of work.”

— Harold Pinter

32. “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

33. “There are some good rules and there are some lousy rules.”

— Harold Pinter

34. “Referees are the law. They have a whistle. They blow it. And that whistle is the articulation of God’s justice.”

— Harold Pinter

35. “The weasel under the cocktail cabinet.”

— Harold Pinter

36. “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

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

— Harold Pinter

38. “Don’t forget the earth’s about five thousand million years old, at least. Who can afford to live in the past?”

— Harold Pinter

39. “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.”

— Harold Pinter

40. “I can’t believe that what anyone is at this moment saying has ever happened has never happened. Nothing has ever happened. Nothing. This is the only thing that has ever happened.”

— Harold Pinter

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

— Harold Pinter

42. “I believe an international criminal court is very much to be desired.”

— Harold Pinter

43. “When you lead a life of scholarship you can’t be bothered with the humorous realities, you know, tits, that kind of thing.”

— Harold Pinter

44. “The Companion of Honour I regarded as an award from the country for 50 years of work – which I thought was okay.”

— Harold Pinter

45. “Stan, don’t let them tell you what to do!”

— Harold Pinter

46. “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

47. “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.”

— Harold Pinter

48. “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.”

— Harold Pinter

49. “All that happens is that the destruction of human beings – unless they’re Americans – is called collateral damage.”

— Harold Pinter

50. “I know little of women. But I’ve heard dread tales.”

— Harold Pinter