David Hare Quotes

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

— David Hare

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.

— David Hare

“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.”

— David Hare

“No one but a fool is always right.”

— David Hare

“Now it turns out that a few broadsheet film critics in Britain do indeed belong to a category of people who would have resisted Hitler when he came to power. So the great shame is, clearly film critics should have been running Austria at the time, because Hitler would have represented no problem to them at all. [The Guardian's] Peter Bradshaw would have known exactly what to do, and he would not have been remotely fallible to any Nazi who threatened his life. No, he would have died in heroic acts of individual resistance. So it's a privilege to live among people who enjoy such moral certainty.”

— David Hare

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

— David Hare

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

— David Hare

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

— David Hare

“We had six years of happiness. And it was you who had to spoil it. With you, when something is right, it's never enough. You don't value happiness. You don't even realize. Because you always want more. (She”

— David Hare

“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.”

— David Hare

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.

— David Hare

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

— David Hare

Purity is the feminine, truth the masculine of honor.

— David Hare

“Smiles are the language of love.”

— David Hare

Thought is the wind and knowledge the sail.

— David Hare

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.

— David Hare

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

— David Hare

The ultimate tendency of civilization is towards barbarism.

— David Hare

“In oratory the will must predominate.”

— David Hare

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

— David Hare

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

— David Hare

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

— David Hare

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

— David Hare

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

— David Hare

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

— David Hare

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

— David Hare

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

— David Hare

Children always turn to the light.

— David Hare

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

— David Hare

“The future of American film lies on television.”

— David Hare

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

— David Hare

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?

— David Hare

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.

— David Hare

“I believe love opens people up.”

— David Hare

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.

— David Hare

“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.”

— David Hare

“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.”

— David Hare

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.

— David Hare

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

— David Hare

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

— David Hare

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

— David Hare

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?"

— David Hare

[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.

— David Hare

“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.”

— David Hare

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

— David Hare

“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.”

— David Hare

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

— David Hare

“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.”

— David Hare

“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.”

— David Hare

“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.”

— David Hare