David Hare > Quotes

“The act of writing is the act of discovering what you believe.”
― David Hare

“You give them an environment where they feel they can grow. But also make bloody sure you challenge them. You make sure they realise learning is hard. Because if you don’t, if you only make it a safe haven, if it’s all clap-happy, and ‘everything the kids do is great’, then what are you creating? Emotional toffees, who’ve actually learnt nothing, but who then have to go back and face the real world … Find that balance, it stretches you, it stretches you as far as you’ll go.”
― David Hare, Skylight

“You make love like a wounded panther. You are like a paintshop on fire.”
― David Hare, A Map of the World

“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, Skylight

“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, Skylight

“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!”
― David Hare, Skylight

“I had a couple of restaurants, nothing too grand. But I’d already worked out – I’m not an idiot – you either run money or else it runs you. If you keep your money … if you’re frightened to spend it, you become its prisoner. OK, sure, when you’re making it, be as mean as you like. But when you spend it, just give. Give. Show your contempt for it.”
― David Hare, Skylight

“No single move traps the king.”
― David Hare

“On September 11th, America changed. Yes. It got much stupider.”
― David Hare, Stuff Happens

“Dear Leonard. To look life in the face, always, to look life in the face and to know it for what it is. At last to know it, to love it for what it is, and then, to put it away. Leonard, always the years between us, always the years. Always the love. Always the hours.”
― 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, Via Dolorosa & When Shall We Live?

“the world was created this morning. No such thing as the past …”
― David Hare, Skylight

“No one but a fool is always right.”
― David Hare

“Oh damn and fuck show business and all its ways.”
― David Hare, Acting Up

“The most dementing of all modern sins: the inability to distinguish excellence from success.”
― 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, Via Dolorosa & When Shall We Live?

“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, Skylight

“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

“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

“As Michael Cunningham would later write in his novel The Hours, I thought what I was feeling was the beginning of happiness. In fact, it was happiness.”
― David Hare, The Blue Touch Paper: A Memoir

“Toby. - It was how I was always told you could get women into bed. By doing something called ‘listening to their problems’. It’s a contemptible tactic.
Kyra. - You wouldn’t do it?
Toby. - No. Of course not. You know me, Kyra. I wouldn’t stoop to it. Either they want you or else they don’t. Listening’s halfway to begging.”
― 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, Skylight

“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

“If anything has been my salvation as a human being it is this choice of an activity which is, at the deepest level, out of my hands. What a relief! What a blessing! Better still, it had always been a drawback to see life differently from other people. In childhood, it had brought me little but heartache. Now I had stumbled on a profession in which it was an asset. 7 Five Good Scenes At the Royal Court, at any one moment, we had stacks of plays being considered.”
― David Hare, The Blue Touch Paper: A Memoir

“Toby. - You know Alice. She got hold of this bloody word ‘spiritual’. It’s one of those words I’ve never quite understood. I mean, I’ve always hated the way people use it. They use it to try and bump themselves up. ‘Oh I’ve had a spiritual experience,’ they say …
Kyra. - Yes.
Toby. - As if that’s the end of the argument. ‘Spiritual’, meaning: ‘It’s mine and shove off.’ People use it to prove they’re sensitive. They want it to dignify quite ordinary things.
Religion. Now, that is something different. I like religion. Because religion has rules. It’s based on something which actually occurred. There are things to believe in. And what’s more, what makes it worth following – not that I do, mind you – there’s some expectation of how you’re meant to behave. But ‘spiritual’ … well, it’s all wishy-washy. It means, ‘Well, for me, for me this is terribly important, but I’m fucked if I can really say why …”
― David Hare, Skylight

“Kyra: I always felt profoundly at peace. I don’t know why, it still seems true to me: if you have a love, which for any reason you can’t talk about, your heart is with someone you can’t admit - not to a single soul except for the person involved - then for me, well, I have to say, that’s love at its purest. For as long as it lasts, it’s this astonishing achievement. Because it’s always a relationship founded in trust.

Tom: It seems mad to me.”
― David Hare, Skylight

“We live in a country which is spavined with ancestor-
worship. This country will never, can never prosper until it
escapes from its past.”
― David Hare, The Absence of War

“What is a city? What should it be? Why do we live in groups? What do we want from cities? And who decides?”
― David Hare, Straight Line Crazy

“And do you really never look at anything -- anything at all -- and consider it might be beautiful in itself?”
― David Hare, Straight Line Crazy