Harold Pinter Quotes About Language

Quotes about: Language

• I suggest that US foreign policy can still be defined as "kiss my ass or I'll kick your head in." But of course it doesn't put it like that. It talks of "low intensity conflict..." What all this adds up to is a disease at the very centre of language, so that language becomes a permanent masquerade, a tapestry of lies.

  Harold Pinter

  Lying, Kissing, Add

  "Oh, Superman". Broadcast for "Opinion" on Channel 4 (May 31, 1990); later quoted in Harold Pinter "Various Voices: Prose, Poetry, Politics 1948-2005" (pp. 198-199), 2005.

• Language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction, a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which might give way under you ... at any time.

  Harold Pinter

  Art, Giving, Frozen

  Harold Pinter (2009). “Various Voices: Sixty Years of Prose, Poetry, Politics, 1948-2008”

• Do the structures of language and the structures of reality (by which I mean what actually happens) move along parallel lines? Does reality essentially remain outside language, separate, obdurate, alien, not susceptible to description? Is an accurate and vital correspondence between what is and our perception of it impossible? Or is it that we are obliged to use language only in order to obscure and distort reality -- to distort what happens -- because we fear it?

  Harold Pinter

  Moving, Mean, Reality

• I would never use obscene language in the office. Certainly not. I kept my obscene language for the home, where it belongs.

  Harold Pinter

  Home, Office, Use

  Harold Pinter (2013). “Harold Pinter: Plays 4: Betrayal; Monologue; One for the Road; Mountain Language; Family Voices; A Kind of Alaska; Victoria Station; Precisely; The New World Order; Party Time; Moonlight: Ashes to Ashes; Celebration; Umbrellas; God's District; Apart from That”, p.253, Faber & Faber

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