Harold Pinter

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 that NATO is itself a war criminal.

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.

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

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.

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 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 never think of myself as wise. I think of myself as possessing a critical intelligence which I intend to allow to operate.

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

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.

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.

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