Top 62 David Hare Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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.
David Hare
#5. 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
#6. Insofar as I'm good at directing, it's because I've become a writer.
David Hare
#7. As human beings, we are all not conducting just one narrative but many narratives all at the same time.
David Hare
#8. If you kill a character people feel sad. That's too easy.
David Hare
#9. Weak minds sink under prosperity as well as adversity; but strong and deep ones have two high tides.
David Hare
#10. Purity is the feminine, truth the masculine of honor.
David Hare
#11. Strength was the virtue of paganism; obedience is the virtue of Christianity.
David Hare
#12. I never used to kill characters, because I thought killing characters was cheating.
David Hare
#15. 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
#16. Never take advice from anyone with no investment in the outcome.
David Hare
#17. On September 11th, America changed. Yes. It got much stupider.
David Hare
#18. You can't get a contemporary story about what is going on inside government, and how society sees itself, on American TV.
David Hare
#19. 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
#20. The ultimate tendency of civilization is towards barbarism.
David Hare
#21. Style is the art of getting yourself out of the way, not putting yourself in it.
David Hare
#22. Sudden resolutions, like the sudden rise of mercury in a barometer, indicate little else than the variability of the weather.
David Hare
#23. I actually think love changes everything. I think it's the only thing worth having.
David Hare
#24. Oh damn and fuck show business and all its ways.
David Hare
#25. An inability to handle language is not the same thing as stupidity.
David Hare
#26. I love you, for God's sake. I still love you. I loved you more than anyone on earth. But I'll never trust you, after what happened. It's what Alice said. You'll never grow up. There is no peace in you.
David Hare
#27. The great mystery of adaptation is that true fidelity can only be achieved through lavish promiscuity.
David Hare
#28. Surely our job while we're here on Earth is to learn about the world, not to create parallel universes.
David Hare
#29. Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.
David Hare
#30. The one thing that 'Via Dolorosa' has is no opinions. To me, curiosity is 50 times as valuable as opinion.
David Hare
#31. The act of writing is the act of discovering what you believe.
David Hare
#32. You make love like a wounded panther. You are like a paintshop on fire.
David Hare
#33. 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.
David Hare
#34. [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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. The future of American film lies on television.
David Hare
#38. To those whose God is honor; only disgrace is a sin.
David Hare
#39. 'Via Dolorosa' is the only thing I have ever acted in my life, professionally, and I'll never act again.
David Hare
#40. 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
#41. In oratory the will must predominate.
David Hare
#42. In the '70s, terrorism was much more serious, in that many more people got killed.
David Hare
#43. When they speak, dead frogs fall out of their mouths.
David Hare
#44. I'm trying to write something in which you know that it's all about sex but you never see any.
David Hare
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. In those days, the early 1980s, TV and film were interchangeable.
David Hare
#48. One of the depressing things in England is the total orthodoxy: the law is handed down from Downing Street.
David Hare
#49. The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.
David Hare
#50. America is a crippled giant, England is a sick gnome.
David Hare
#51. 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.
David Hare
#52. 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
#53. 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.
David Hare
#54. 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
#55. Politics is just a function of business now, just a tributary of the great entrepreneurial capitalist system.
David Hare
#57. The actual business of writing dialogue is not thought of as a craft.
David Hare
#58. Thought is the wind and knowledge the sail.
David Hare
#59. 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
#60. 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.
David Hare
#61. 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 Hare
#62. The world was created this morning. No such thing as the past ...
David Hare
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