David Hare Quotations

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.

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

Purity is the feminine, truth the masculine of honor.

Thought is the wind and knowledge the sail.

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

Some people carry their heart in their head and some carry their head in their heart. The trick is to keep them apart yet working together.

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

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

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

The ultimate tendency of civilization is towards barbarism.

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

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

No one but a fool is always right.

Nothing is further than earth from heaven, and nothing is nearer than heaven to earth.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

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

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

When they speak, dead frogs fall out of their mouths.

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

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

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

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

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

He's been both an example and an inspiration to us all.

Smiles are the language of love.

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

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

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.

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

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?"

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.

. . . 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.

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

In oratory the will must predominate.

[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.

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.

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.

Children always turn to the light.

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.

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

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

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

The future of American film lies on television.

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.

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

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.

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.

[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.

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.

As you write plays, you discover what you believe. And until you know what you believe, you can't write a play.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

I fell into writing plays by accident. But the reason I write plays is that it's the only thing I'm any good at.

I believe love opens people up.

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

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

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

The majority don't like me before the curtain goes up, and I always have to win them.

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.

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.

The silence between us was profound. I thought it was his job to say something. Only now do I understand it was mine.

The thing about Shakespeare is, whatever his politics were, the one thing he wasn't was an anarchist. He believes there's something called power, and he believes that somebody has to take it. And that you can't pretend power doesn't exist. And to me, Bush is a person who understands American power, and what it can do. But unfortunately, he's used it in a way that reveals its limitations, and that's the tragedy, if you like.

that the erotic charge is very important in his writing. It really doesn't matter whether he was gay or not, which is a rather arid argument, but what's more important is that he wrote in an openly sexual way. And sex is a vital part of his romanticism.

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?

Not only has Harold Pinter written some of the outstanding plays of his time, he has also blown fresh air into the musty attic of conventional English literature, by insisting that everything he does has a public and political dimension,

In the London production, Powell was represented much more, if you like, as a hero. I admire him as a man who understands what collateral damage is, who understands what a military operation is, and who knows what it's like to see people's lives destroyed by bombs. On the other hand, a number of people who saw the play in London, who were as they say, 'close,' did say, 'You've taken too benign a view of Powell.' And in this production in New York, I've toughened up the writing about Powell. I've come to believe that 'conflicted' would be a very polite word for his UN presentation.

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

I couldn't be happier. This is a brilliant choice.