Harold Pinter: My friend Arthur Miller

His plays - Death of a Salesman, A View From the Bridge, All My Sonsand The Crucible, for example - are among the finest works that havebeen produced in the 20th Century.

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 wemet a lot of writers that had been in prison and had been tortured. Iadmired him tremendously for his independence and his clarity of mind.

He was a wonderful chap and I'm really quite knocked over by thisnews. He was so honest and a man of rare integrity in his writing. Youcould see it in his writing. He was also totally independent.

In the United States, they didn't like him very much because he wastoo outspoken and too critical of the way of life in the United Statesand certain assumptions that were made over there.

But he was unremitting and remorseless in using his criticalintelligence. He did this both as a man and as a playwright, and that'swhy he's such a remarkable figure.

I hadn't spoken to him over the last few months, but I heard he washappily married again, which was wonderful news. We did communicate -he did a seminar about my work in fact in New York a few years ago, andI was very honoured by this, and we spoke on that occasion.

But we'd been a bit out of touch 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 arock, really. He looked like a bit of a rock too. That was one of theother things that made him remarkable -his actual physical presence wasquite formidable.

This certainly embodied itself when we both went to Turkey togetherfor this memorable trip in which we were nearly arrested and there wasa military decree out for our arrest in Istanbul.

We just managed to get away by the skin of our teeth. They didn'tlike us at all over there because we were very independent and he was alandmark, he was a leader, and I was extremely attached to him.

I'm pretty convinced he was writing until the day of his death. He was born with the pen in his hand. “

Harold Pinter was speaking to BBC News 24, 11 February 2005