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

As soon as this amazing comment flung itself at me, I knew I wanted to share it with you. And what better moment than Harold Pinter’s birthday? Born October 10 in 1930, Harold was the author of storied plays, including The Homecoming and The Birthday Party; a Nobel Prize-winning playwright, screenwriter, and director, whose career spanned 50 years. More of his musings:

“Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.”

“Quite simply, my writing life has been one of relish, challenge, excitement.”

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

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

“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.”

“I think plays have nothing to do with one’s own personal life. Not in my experience, anyway. The stuff of drama has to do, not with your subject matter, anyway, but with how you treat it. Drama includes pain, loss, regret – that’s what drama is about!”

“Sometimes you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost.”

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

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

“I do tend to think that I’ve written a great deal out of my unconscious because half the time I don’t know what a given character is going to say next.”

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

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

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

Emboldened and energized by this writer who loved writing, let’s all write on!