Harold Pinter

“I've said it before, and I'll say it again. I've written 29 d--n plays. Isn't that enough?”

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

“Drama happens in big cricket matches. But also in small cricket matches.”

“All that happens is that the destruction of human beings - unless they're Americans - is called collateral damage.”

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

“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 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.”

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

“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 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.”

“I mean, don't forget the earth's about five thousand million years old, at least. Who can afford to live in the past?”

“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.”

“If Milosevic is to be tried, he has to be tried by a proper court, an impartial, properly constituted court which has international respect.”

“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 think that NATO is itself a war criminal.”

“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.”