Not only has Harold Pinter written some of the outstanding plays of his time, he has also blown fresh air into the musty attic of conventional English literature, by insisting that everything he does has a public and political dimension. |
On the one hand, it makes life very difficult for them. On the other hand - and this isn't a recommendation for being a suppressed writer - in their situation now, as with Havel and his friends in the '70s and '80s, the consolation is that your work matters. |
Pirates could happen to anyone. |
Responsibilities gravitate to the person who can shoulder them. |
Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering. |
Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art. |
The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means. |
the bewilderment and incomprehension of critics and audience. |
The days of the digital watch are numbered. |
The House of Lords, an illusion to which I have never been able to subscribe - responsibility without power, the prerogative of the eunuch throughout the ages. |
The media. It sounds like a convention of spiritualists. |
The sense of suppression, ... or self-suppression, and pressure generally which came off even this photograph of the page of this diary was so strong and so moving. There was a love story here. |
The truth is always a compound of two half-truths, and you never reach it, because there is always something more to say |
We are tied down to a language which makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style. |
We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered. |