David Hare Quotes

Artifice is art.

Paint is the skin of a painting: it is fiction. In houses, it disguises the plumbing and wiring and studs and nails.

One wants to see the artifice of the thing as well as the subject.

No art is any good unless you can feel how it's put together. By and large it's the eye, the hand and if it's any good, you feel the body. Most of the best stuff seems to be a complete gesture, the totality of the artist's body; you can really lean on it.

You know, there are many alter egos and Gorillaz is a collective of alter egos, really. I think anyone who gets involved in it has to sort of accept that nothing is really as it seems.

Writing, film, sculpture, music: it's all make-believe, really.

Art revolves around creating something that isn't there.

I am always looking for what piece, what artists, what playwrights, what directors, what subject matter is going to catalyze an audience.

Whatever brief delights it provides, mere strangeness in poetry and prose eventually leaves us cold, especially when we suspect the writer is stretching for effect to avoid the actual life before his eyes.

Artists aren't really people. I'm actually 40 per cent papier mache.

I love the way painting is so full of illusionistic possibilities.

Painting allows me to use other portions of my brain pleasurably. Irony plays no part in what or how I paint. I paint the particular subject matter not to make polemical points but because I am interested in the human imprint on the landscape. I paint the landscape of my time and place with the stuff in it.

You're only kidding yourself if you put creativity before craft.

It is art to conceal art. -Ars est celare artem

What concerns me when I work, is not whether the picture is a landscape, or whether it's pastoral, or whether somebody will see a sunset in it. What concerns me is - did I make a beautiful picture?

Fill a space in a beautiful way.

You may be perfect in playing the piano, and not be creative; you may play the piano most brilliantly, and not be a musician. You may be able to handle color, to put paint on canvas most cleverly, and not be a creative painter. You may create a face, an image out of a stone, because you have learned the technique, and not be a master creator. Creation comes first, not technique.

I try to conceal art with art.

There's this idea that it's all natural, but everything's been staged to look natural. It is also an invention. It's just that my inventions are different. I often get asked about my artifice, but isn't fashion based on the idea that we can create a fantasy?

The division between the useful arts and the fine arts must not be understood in too absolute a manner. In the humblest work of the craftsmen, if art is there, there is a concern for beauty, through a kind of indirect repercussion that the requirements of the creativity of the spirit exercise upon the production of an object to serve human needs.

Art is the most beautiful deception of all!

Camouflage is a game we all like to play

You use the vertical edge as the point of reference, instead of the horizontal edge. I have a picture of a beggar, where there's an arm coming into the frame from the side. And the arm is parallel to the horizontal edge and it makes it work. It's all games, you know. But it keeps it interesting to do, to play.

I try to play, always, beautiful games...always I wanted to create masterpieces.

More and more, I play myself, as I get older. Even as a writer, I never got typecast. I've always bounced from project to project, or initiated my own things. I was never known as the guy who wrote romantic comedies or sci-fi, or whatever, but that's fun to me. The first two films I ever had made, as a writer, were both thrillers, which was great. There was nothing funny about either of them, or not intentionally. I actually love that.