Harold Pinter died 78 on Wednesday from cancer. David Hare said of Mr. Pinter that “The essence of his singular appeal is that you sit down to every play or film he writes in certain expectation of the unexpected.”

“Even old Sophocles didn’t know what was going to happen next,” Pinter says. “He had to find his way through unknown territory. At the same time, theater has always been a critical act, looking in a broad sense at the society in which we live and attempting to reflect and dramatize these findings. We’re not talking about the moon.” “I find at the end of the journey, which of course is never ending, that I have found things out.” “I don’t go away and say: ‘I have illuminated myself. You see before you a changed person. It’s a more surreptitious sense of discovery that happens to the writer himself.” As he said to Peter Wood of “The Birthday Party”, “The play dictated itself, but I confess that I wrote it — with intent, maliciously, purposefully, in command of its growth.”

Harold Pinter, The Nobel Acceptance Speech (Art, Truth and Politics):