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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

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

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.

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.

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