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.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

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

Smiles are the language of love.

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

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

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.

Thought is the wind and knowledge the sail.

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

No one but a fool is always right.

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.

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

Purity is the feminine, truth the masculine of honor.

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.

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

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 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.

The future of American film lies on television.

I believe love opens people up.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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?"

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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