Truth in drama is forever elusive. You never quite find it, but the search for it is compulsive. The search is clearly what drives the endeavour. The search is your task.

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.

It's so easy for propaganda to work, and dissent to be mocked.

Only by the sweat of my own brow. I am a totally working man.

The past is what you remember, imagine you remember, convince yourself you remember, or pretend you remember.

My father was a tailor. He worked from seven o'clock in the morning until seven at night. At least when he got home, my mother always cooked him a very good dinner. Lots of potatoes, I remember; he used to knock them down like a dose of salts. He needed it, after a 12-hour day.

There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.

I ought not to speak about the dead because the dead are all over the place.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

I'm well aware that I have been described in some quarters as being 'enigmatic, taciturn, prickly, explosive and forbidding'. Well, I have my moods like anyone else; I won't deny it.

Apart from the known and the unknown, what else is there?

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.

Political theatre presents an entirely different set of problems. Sermonising has to be avoided at all cost. Objectivity is essential. The characters must be allowed to breathe their own air. The author cannot confine and constrict them to satisfy his own taste or disposition or prejudice.

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

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

The Room I wrote in 1957, and I was really gratified to find that it stood up. I didn't have to change a word.

As far as I'm concerned, 'The Caretaker' is funny up to a point. Beyond that, it ceases to be funny, and it was because of that point that I wrote it.

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

The crimes of the U.S. throughout the world have been systematic, constant, clinical, remorseless, and fully documented but nobody talks about them.

The whole brunt of the media and the government is to encourage people to be highly competitive and totally selfish and uncaring of others.

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

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.

This particular nurse said, Cancer cells are those which have forgotten how to die. I was so struck by this statement.

I believe an international criminal court is very much to be desired.

I've never been able to understand what they mean by 'Pinteresque,'. I'm sure it's indefinable.

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

I always start a play by calling the characters A, B, and C.

My first play was 'The Room', written when I was twenty-seven.

I don't idealise women. I enjoy them. I have been married to two of the most independent women it is possible to think of.

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.

All I can say is that I did admire 'The Lives of Others', which I thought was really about something and beautifully done.

I think that NATO is itself a war criminal.

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.

One's life has many compartments.

Analysis I take to be a scientific procedure. What I do is creative. It doesn't spring from the same part of the mind.

A short piece of work means as much to me as a long piece of work.

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

Beckett had an unerring light on things, which I much appreciated.

I also found being called Sir rather silly.

I could be a bit of a pain in the arse. Since I've come out of my cancer, I must say I intend to be even more of a pain in the arse.

I don't think there's been any writer like Samuel Beckett. He's unique. He was a most charming man and I used to send him my plays.

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.

I think it is the responsibility of a citizen of any country to say what he thinks.

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.

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

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

Occasionally it does hit me, the words on a page. And I still love doing that, as I have for the last 60 years.

One is and is not in the centre of the maelstrom of it all.

There are some good rules and there are some lousy rules.

There is a movement to get an international criminal court in the world, voted for by hundreds of states-but with the noticeable absence of the United States of America.