David Hare Quotes

Thought is the wind and knowledge the sail.

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

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.

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.

We appealed to the conscience of the world. The world has no conscience. We have no one but ourselves.
The fight. The struggle. The historic destiny. The return of the people. The cause: life therefore having a meaning and shape that eludes the rest of us in the endless wash of 'What the hell are we doing here?' In a single day, says an Israeli friend, he experiences events and emotions that would keep a Swede going for a year.

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

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

On September 11th, America changed. Yes. It got much stupider.

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

Are we simply waving farewell to the days when some of the most interesting thinking in Europe and America came to us from our fiction film-makers? BBC2, which once introduced and showed great films, now shows none.

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

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.

Strength was the virtue of paganism; obedience is the virtue of Christianity.

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

If you like judging, please: be a lawyer. Run a dog show. There's a whole lot of jobs if judging is your passion in life. But take my advice: if you want to be happy, keep your judging professional. And don't start putting in practice at home.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

As human beings, we are all not conducting just one narrative but many narratives all at the same time.

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.

The act of writing is the act of discovering what you believe.

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

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

No one but a fool is always right.

You give them an environment where they feel they can grow. But also make bloody sure you challenge them. You make sure they realise learning is hard. Because if you don't, if you only make it a safe haven, if it's all clap-happy, and 'everything the kids do is great', then what are you creating? Emotional toffees, who've actually learnt nothing, but who then have to go back and face the real world … Find that balance, it stretches you, it stretches you as far as you'll go.

In the '70s, terrorism was much more serious, in that many more people got killed.

Edward Once they're dead, I find they keep changing. You think you've got hold of them. And it's like you say, 'Oh I see. So that's what she was like.' But then they change again in your memory. It drives you crazy. Now I'd like to find out just who she was.

And it's a preference, a long-held preference, what you might call a 'habit of mind' - putting words into other people's mouths. And those people are played by people whose profession is to pretend to be other people. For which purpose, they adopt gestures, voices, intonations, even sexual attitudes not their own. On stage, they affect to be ravished and amused by someone whom they will, afterwards, run a mile to avoid having dinner with. Likewise, they spit torrents of abuse against an actor who later, later, in the softness of the night, they will share their bed with.

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.

Surely our job while we're here on Earth is to learn about the world, not to create parallel universes.

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.

No single move traps the king.

I'm tired of these sophistries. I'm tired of these right-wing fuckers. They wouldn't lift a finger themselves. They work contentedly in offices and banks. Yet now they sit pontificating in parliament, in papers, impugning our motives, questioning our judgements. And why? Because they themselves need to feel better by putting down everyone whose work is so much harder than theirs. You only have to say the words 'social worker'…'probation officer' … 'counsellor' … for everyone in this country to sneer. Do you know what social workers do? Every day? They try and clear out society's drains. They clear out the rubbish. They do what no one else is doing, what no one else is willing to do. And for that, oh Christ, do we thank them? No, we take our own rotten consciences, wipe them all over the social worker's face, and say 'if…' FUCK! 'if I did the job, then of course if I did it…oh no, excuse me, I wouldn't do it like that…' Well I say: 'OK, then, fucking do it, journalist. Politician, talk to the addicts. Hold families together. Stop the kids from stealing in the streets. Deal with couples who beat each other up. You fucking try it, why not? Since you're so full of advice. Sure, come and join us. This work is one big casino. By all means. Anyone can play. But there's only one rule. You can't play for nothing. You have to buy some chips to sit at the table. And if you won't pay with your own time…with your own effort…then I'm sorry. Fuck
off!

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

The world was created this morning. No such thing as the past ...

If you do the things that Britain needs to do - namely, withdraw from NATO, get rid of the bomb, and stop being aligned with one side of the Cold War - then presumably the run on the pound, the result in the stock exchanges of the world, will be fairly catastrophic for the economy. But some sort of political realignment is plainly what this country needs.

You can't get a contemporary story about what is going on inside government, and how society sees itself, on American TV.

In oratory the will must predominate.

People always say that in England we lead shallow lives. Our lives must be shallow because we live in a country where nobody believes in anything any more. My whole life, I've been told: 'Western civilization? An old bitch gone in the teeth,' And so people say, go to Israel. Because in Israel at least people are fighting. In Israel, they're fighting for something they believe in.

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?"

Smiles are the language of love.

[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.

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

Purity is the feminine, truth the masculine of honor.

America is a crippled giant, England is a sick gnome.

The actual business of writing dialogue is not thought of as a craft.

If the purpose of the stumpy little NFT theatre under Waterloo Bridge is not to acquaint young audiences with Ozu, with Ophuels, with D. W. Griffith and with Agnes Varda, then what exactly does it exist for?

I believe love opens people up.

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 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.

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.

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

Toby. - It was how I was always told you could get women into bed. By doing something called 'listening to their problems'. It's a contemptible tactic.
Kyra. - You wouldn't do it?
Toby. - No. Of course not. You know me, Kyra. I wouldn't stoop to it. Either they want you or else they don't. Listening's halfway to begging.

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

Politics is just a function of business now, just a tributary of the great entrepreneurial capitalist system.