Top 50 David Hare Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “No one but a fool is always right.”

— David Hare

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

— David Hare

Featured in: Strong Quotes

3. “Smiles are the language of love.”

— David Hare

4. “Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.”

— David Hare

5. “Thought is the wind and knowledge the sail.”

— David Hare

6. “I believe love opens people up.”

— David Hare

7. “In oratory the will must predominate.”

— David Hare

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

— David Hare

9. “Purity is the feminine, truth the masculine of honor.”

— David Hare

10. “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

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

— David Hare

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

— David Hare

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

— David Hare

14. “The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.”

— David Hare

15. “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.”

— David Hare

16. “Children always turn to the light.”

— David Hare

17. “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

18. “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.”

— David Hare

19. “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

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

— David Hare

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

— David Hare

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

— David Hare

23. “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

24. “If you kill a character people feel sad. That’s too easy.”

— David Hare

25. “The most important playwright’s gift is to hit your time and speak to your time.”

— David Hare

26. “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.”

— David Hare

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

— David Hare

28. “No single move traps the king.”

— David Hare

29. “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

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

— David Hare

31. “You make love like a wounded panther. You are like a paintshop on fire.”

— David Hare

32. “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

33. “The ultimate tendency of civilization is towards barbarism.”

— David Hare

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

— David Hare

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

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

— David Hare

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

— David Hare

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

— David Hare

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

— David Hare

39. “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

40. “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.”

— David Hare

41. “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

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

— David Hare

43. “As you write plays, you discover what you believe. And until you know what you believe, you can’t write a play.”

— David Hare

44. “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

45. “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

46. “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

47. “The future of American film lies on television.”

— David Hare

48. “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

49. “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

50. “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