Harold Pinter (1930– 2008) was an English playwright, actor, poet, and political activist. He was awarded the 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature. He also wrote for radio and television, directed plays, and wrote screenplays
Born in East London, Pinter started writing poetry for little magazines in his adolescence. As a young man, he studied drama at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and the Central School of Speech and Drama, but soon left to start an acting career. He spent many years working in provincial repertory prior to deciding to turn his attention to playwriting in 1957.
Pinter had mentioned an idea for a play to a friend who worked in the drama department at Bristol University. The friend liked the proposal so much that he wrote to Pinter requesting the play within a week so that the university could perform it. Pinter declined the offer—then sat down and wrote The Room (1957) in just four days. The Room received a favorable review from Harold Hobson, the distinguished drama critic of the Sunday Times.
Pinter’s notable plays include his second play The Birthday Party (1958,) The Caretaker (1960,) The Homecoming (1965,) and Party Time (1991.) His plays feature his trademark combination of realism and the bizarre, and his portrayal of the many layers of meaning in language, pause, and stillness—a style branded by the popular imagination as ‘Pinteresque.’
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The general thrust these days is: Oh, come on, it’s all in the past, nobody’s interested any more, it didn’t work, everyone knows what the Americans are like, but stop being naive, this is the world, there’s nothing to be done about it and anyway fuck it, who cares? But let me put it this way-the dead are still looking at us, waiting for us to acknowledge our part in their murder.
—Harold Pinter
Topics: The Past
Apart from the known and the unknown, what else is there?
—Harold Pinter
Topics: Philosophy
Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.
—Harold Pinter
Topics: Writers, Authors & Writing, Writing
One way of looking at speech is to say it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness.
—Harold Pinter
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.
—Harold Pinter
Topics: Sex