Gavin Stewart, Scotland
Did you not find it a truly awesome task, trying not only to fully understand a dramatist and man like Pinter but also to articulate and express his dramatic vision?

Michael Billington
It was awesome. I would never claim to have provided the definitive answer but if I got close to Pinter it was because of his generosity in opening himself up to me. The great thing was I was free to ask him virtually any question I wanted to about the work and its origins and how these plays developed in his imagination. The clue he gave me or what I deduced was that these works nearly all began from some personal or autobiographical experience and time and again I was struck by the fact that these plays had an origin in Pinter's own experience or the experiences of friends. These were not abstract works of art, they were not theoretical works, they were based on practical human experience.

Lucian Randall, London
I thought your biography of Pinter was so good. A real landmark. What's surprising for someone familiar with Pinter's work is that for years nobody got anything out of him by way of accompaniment apart from the famous "weasel under the cocktail cabinet" comment. I can understand that he might want to be involved with a biography at this stage in his life, but there does seem to a be a 'new' Pinter in evidence over the last few years and I wondered what made him open up to such a degree.

Michael Billington
Thank you for your kind remarks. Quite simply the book happened because I got a letter from a publisher saying that Harold Pinter would welcome a short book on his politics and was I interested in writing it. Out of that came a much larger and total biography. It's difficult to know why Pinter chose this moment in the 1990s to open up. I think it's because he felt his political ideas were being misinterpreted and misunderstood, particularly in the newspapers at the time, and I think he felt The Guardian and myself were more likely to give him a fair hearing. I think he just wanted to explain to someone what he was passionate about and angry about in the modern world. After that, for reasons I can't entirely explain, came the willingness to have his whole life opened up to a biography. The only answer I can offer is that it was better done by someone who liked his plays and was politically sympathetic than someone who wasn't. But you're right - in recent years he's become much more available, much more open, much more willing to discuss the source of the plays. I think it's because with age comes a degree of mellowing and a recognition that Pinter would like the record to be set straight while he is still alive.

Matt Burns, Essex
In your opinion, what makes him "tick" and what was it that that actually drew you to his work?

Michael Billington
This is a very direct and a very difficult question. I think what makes him tick as a writer is his own sense of the world as a strange and fearful place in which one never feels quite at home and in which security, certainty and fixity are never absolute. In other words what makes Pinter tick as an artist is the feeling that we all go through life feeling slightly provisional about ourselves, about our status and about our relationship with our loved ones.

I also believe he is plagued and haunted by the notion of memory and by the idea that as we go through daily life we are occupied by our memory of past events, past emotional circumstances and these can break through at any moment. That we cannot control our memory, but that our memory constantly inhabits us. To me, memory is almost the key to Pinter's whole work as an artist. If you go to the plays you will find the characters are always referring back to some past time when they did feel a sense of vague certainty and in the present they are always floundering and looking for some form of definition. That even applies, I think, to the later political plays like One for the Road where the hero, although he is a figure of power in an authoritarian state, is always referring back to some more golden past before the age of dissent.

As for what drew me to his work it was for precisely those qualities, but it was also his ability to command a theatrical atmosphere. Pinter emerged in the late 1950s with a host of other very fine writers like John Osborne and Joe Orton. I think that what made Pinter different was his command of speech and gesture so that no moment in a Pinter play was ever without meaning or significance and no word was spoken that didn't have some bearing on the character and plot. In a nutshell I think it's his absolute dramatic economy which makes him a master.

Era Gjurgjeala, Kosova
What did Pinter have to say on your completion of the biography?

Michael Billington
I gave Pinter the draft version of the biography to read on a Friday afternoon at about 4pm. On Sunday evening my phone rang and Pinter said he had read it. All he said was, "I'm not embarrassed by it, but I have some questions I want to ask you". All he objected to were misstatements of fact. I did get the impression from Pinter that he thought I'd over stressed the idea of his youth as a kind of golden age. Much of his writing is about trying to recapture the joys and the memories of youth. I think Pinter believes I romanticised his growing up in Hackney. He had a much more difficult and awkward time than I said. But he had the tact never to comment directly on the book. He's never said that he likes it, he's never said that he dislikes it, he's simply said he wasn't embarrassed by it - and coming from Pinter I took that to be high praise.

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