Pinter talks about his friend and fellow Nobel Prize winner Arthur Miller, just after Miller's death.
"He was a great playwright and a great man- and a great friend of mine. It's been a great shock to hear this news, although he was pretty old.
...
But he was also a highly dignified and an extraordinarily formidable man, an independent man.
He and I had a memorable trip to Turkey about 20 years ago when we met a lot of writers that had been in prison and had been tortured. I admired him tremendously for his independence and his clarity of mind.
...
I hadn't spoken to him over the last few months... and I'm absolutely flabbergasted to hear that he's gone.
He had a wonderful kind of velocity about him. He was as tough as a rock, really. He looked like a bit of a rock too. That was one of the other things that made him remarkable - his actual physical presence was quite formidable.
This certainly embodied itself when we both went to Turkey together for this memorable trip in which we were nearly arrested and there was a military decree out for our arrest in Istanbul.
We just managed to get away by the skin of our teeth
...
I'm pretty convinced he was writing until the day of his death. He was born with the pen in his hand."
The link is here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/4258707.stm dated 11 Feb 2005.
