Harold Pinter

GOLDBERG. Of course, now. Time’s getting on. Round the corner, remember? Mention my name.

Stanley cannot perceive his only valid justification - which is he is what he is - therefore he certainly can never be articulate about it...

We’ve agreed: the hierarchy, The Establishment, the arbiters, the socio-religious monsters arrive to affect censure and alteration upon a member of the club who has discarded responsibility (that word again) towards himself and others. (What is your opinion, by the way, of the act of suicide?) He does possess, however, for my money, a certain fibre – he fights for his life. It doesn’t last long, this fight. His core being a quagmire of delusion, his mind a tenuous fuse box, he collapses under the weight of their accusation – an accusation compounded of the shit-stained strictures of centuries of ‘tradition’.

what are you but a corpse waiting to be washed?

Sandinistas are a democratically elected government which originally led a popular revolution to overthrow a dictatorship based on slavery. ... US foreign policy could be best defined as follows: kiss my arse or I'll kick your head in. It is as simple and as crude as that. It can hardly be said to be a complicated foreign policy. What is interesting about it is that it is so incredibly successful. It possesses the structures of disinformation, use of rhetoric, distortion of language, which are very persuasive, but are actually a pack of lies. It is very successful propaganda. They have the money, they have the technology, they have all the means to get away with it, and they do. I find the ignorance in this country, Britain, and certainly the US, really quite deep. It is not only the Republican Party and government in the US which are responsible for this state of affairs, but I see the Democrats as only differing by degrees. While they say "no more military aid to the Contras"… they are still referring to an innate and deeply embedded assumption that they are talking about a Marxist-Leninist totalitarian dictatorship; gangsters, thugs, instructed from Moscow.

Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words ‘the American people’ provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don’t need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it’s very comfortable.

I hate brandy...it stinks of modern literature.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

And there she was, very dim, very still, placed more or less I would say at the dead centre of the auditorium. I was off centre and have remained so.

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

But death permits you
To arrange your hours
While he sucks the honey
From your lovely flowers

EMMA:
You know what I found out ... last night? He's betrayed me for years. He's had... other women for years.

JERRY
No? Good Lord.
(Pause)
But we betrayed him for years.

EMMA
And he betrayed me for years.

JERRY
Well I never knew that.

EMMA
Nor did I.

If only I could get down to Sidcup! I've been waiting for the weather to break. He's got my papers, this man I left them with, it's got it all down there, I could prove everything.

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.

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.

هناك أشياء يستطيع الإنسان أن يتذكرها ولو أنها لم تحدث إطلاقا. هناك أمور أتذكرها ربما لم تحدث أبدا، لكن عندما أسترجعها تحتل مكانا في خيالي.