101 Quotes by David Hare

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Oh damn and fuck show business and all its ways.

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.

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