David Hare Quotes

In oratory the will must predominate.

Sudden resolutions, like the sudden rise of mercury in a barometer, indicate little else than the variability of the weather.

. . . it is true that language and forward movement in the cinema are jolly hard to reconcile. It's a very, very, difficult thing to do. . . . There is still a place in the cinema for movies that are driven by the human face, and not by explosions and cars and guns and action sequences . . . there's such a thing as action and speed within thought rather than within a ceaseless milkshake of images.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Smiles are the language of love.

Never take advice from anyone with no investment in the outcome.

The theatre is the best way of showing the gap between what is said and what is seen to be done, and that is why, ragged and gap-toothed as it is, it has still a far healthier potential than some poorer, abandoned arts.

When you get older, then you feel death not at the end of the road, but death all around you, in everything. Life is saturated with death. I feel death everywhere.

Weak minds sink under prosperity as well as adversity; but strong and deep ones have two high tides.

No one but a fool is always right.

Thought is the wind and knowledge the sail.

Style is the art of getting yourself out of the way, not putting yourself in it.

What politicians want and what creative writers want will always be profoundly different, because I'm afraid all politicians, of whatever hue, want propaganda, and writers want the truth, and they're not compatible.

The most important playwright's gift is to hit your time and speak to your time.

You cant get a contemporary story about what is going on inside government, and how society sees itself, on American TV.

The ultimate tendency of civilization is towards barbarism.

An inability to handle language is not the same thing as stupidity.

The great mystery of adaptation is that true fidelity can only be achieved through lavish promiscuity.

If you kill a character people feel sad. That's too easy.

The future of American film lies on television.

Trying to be a socialist and a libertarian is obviously a very difficult balancing act, which nobody has pulled off too successfully in this century.

To those whose God is honor; only disgrace is a sin.

Purity is the feminine, truth the masculine of honor.

I actually think love changes everything. I think it's the only thing worth having.

The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.

A weak mind sinks under prosperity, as well as under adversity. A strong and deep mind has two highest tides - when the moon is at the full, and when there is no moon.

I believe love opens people up.

My father always said 'There's no free lunch.' My father was right. There's no free lunch and there's no free market. The market is rigged, the market is always rigged, and the rigging is in favour of the people who run the market. That's what the market is. It's a bent casino. The house always wins.

For a politician, the mans to power is paramount, and the ideology, in a way, can look after itself; I'm afraid a writer can't think like that. A writer has to think that it's more important to be right than to be popular.

I don't think of my plays as steamy places where people display huge amounts of emotions. The feeling is underneath, which in my experience is where most feeling is. I don't myself spend my life shouting in rooms, and I don't really believe things in which people do spend their time in total hysteria.

Children always turn to the light.

Via Dolorosa is the only thing I have ever acted in my life, professionally, and Ill never act again.

The one thing that Via Dolorosa has is no opinions. To me, curiosity is 50 times as valuable as opinion.

In those days, the early 1980s, TV and film were interchangeable.

One of the depressing things in England is the total orthodoxy: the law is handed down from Downing Street.

I'm trying to write something in which you know that it's all about sex but you never see any.

I have a very, very good relationship with 10 percent of the audience. The only purpose of art is intimacy. That's the only point.

I don't see the theater as an establishment. The National Theatre has always seemed to me a people's theater. It was never meant to reinforce the values of the government of the day, nor does it, nor should it.

Obviously VIA DOLOROSA is completely artificial. It is as highly wrought as any of my plays. But basically all the artifice is to disguise itself so you don't feel it's there. You're attempting to make the artifice like a pane of glass that simply leads you through to the subject - not to decorate the bloody glass.

One of the things I find about getting older is that I seem to get louder, more voluble; that I constantly have to walk around repressing my vitality.

[VIA DOLOROSA]'s pushing Broadway as far as it can be pushed. I stand before you as a reporter, and you have to decide whether I'm an honest reporter or not. And if you're convinced that I am honest, then I think that you will listen to me in a way that you wouldn't have listened to a fiction where scenes are made. . . . I've thought quite long and hard about what I want to say in this play. And if it means that every single sentiment that I produce is put minutely under an ideological microscope, that's fine.

I think the novel is the American form because people read it in private, and the only valuable things that happen in America happen in private life, because public life is a dead loss.

I'm vey bad at marshaling arguments. I can't, at a dinner party, explain why I'm a socialist and why others should be socialists as well.

Writers always sound insufferably smug when they sit back and assert that their job is only to ask questions and not to answer them. But, in good part, it is true. And once you become committed to one particular answer, your freedom to ask new questions is seriously impaired.

Insofar as I'm good at directing, it's because I've become a writer.

I'm not good at standing on platforms and persuading people to my political point of view. Nor would I seek to. My gift is completely different. It's for presenting an imaginative version of the world which I hope people would recognize and be affected by.

[David] Mamet's the writer I admire most but he's way off from when he tries to talk about what the moral appeal of liberal thought is. His heart is not in it.

The orthodoxy of America is as rigid as that of Soviet Russia. There is one point of view allowed. If you start a conversation from another point of view, the words dry in your mouth.

I never used to kill characters, because I thought killing characters was cheating.

It's inevitable that you will die, so the only question is when. The great thrillers are the moments that play and tease with the question, "When will it be?"