Best 47 quotes of David Hare on MyQuotes

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

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.

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

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.

Children always turn to the light.

[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.

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 believe love opens people up.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

. . . 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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Purity is the feminine, truth the masculine of honor.

Smiles are the language of love.

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

The future of American film lies on television.

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

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

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

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

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.

The ultimate tendency of civilization is towards barbarism.

Thought is the wind and knowledge the sail.

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

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.

[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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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!

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.

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.

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.