David Hare Quotes

I've been running from, and toward, death all my life, more aware of it than a person should be.

I don't like being 50 and I don't like thinking about death.

At the age of 31, I realized, 'Oh my God, I may die like everyone else.'

If you're a serious actor, it's when you know you're going to die tomorrow that you really start to feel it.

the brut first knows death when it dies, but man draws consciously nearer to it every hour that he lives; and this makes his life at times a questionable good even to him who has not recognised this character of constant anaihilation in the whole of life.

Old age is the lubricant of belief. When death knocks at the door, skepticism flies out the window. A serious cardiovascular fright and a person will even believe in Little Red Riding Hood.

Life begins when a person first realizes how soon it will end.

Age doesn't bother me. So many of my heroes were older guys. It's the lack of years left that weighs far heavier on me than the age that I am.

We tend to talk about death as if it is losing a battle, but that assumes living is winning and dying is not.

There's nothing like impending death to rouse you from existential boredom.

I think old people are scary. They remind you of your own death. People don't like to tell you that.

It doesn't matter. What matters is that you're about to die.

I think that when we wrestle with death... we start fearing life, because then we come to terms with something that is inevitable.

At the age of 18 all young poets are sure they will be dead at 21 - of old age.

You're immortal, aren't you, until you get a little peek over the precipice. The thought of death...You're not supposed to start pondering it until you're old. And there's nothing like being told you've got a life-threatening disease to concentrate your mind on that.

I've always been most drawn to fiction that wrestles with that death-fear. Sometimes I joke with my students, 'If no one is in danger of dying, I'm not interested,' but of course I'm not really joking.

No thought is born in me that does not bear the image of death.

The biggest fear that everybody has is dying. Not to get too meta on you, but I think every fear that people are trying to work out is really like I'm going to die and no one is going to care, and it doesn't matter because God might not exist. That's what people are trying to figure out. I wish we all had one fear so we could think about it together and figure out a solution, but we're all doing different things.

When you understand that you will die to-morrow, if not to-day, and nothing will be left, then everything is so unimportant!... So one goes on living, amusing oneself with hunting, with work - anything so as not think of death

I knew the facts of death before I knew the facts of life. There never was a time when I didn't see the skull beneath the skin.

Webster was much possessed by death And saw the skull beneath the skin.

Love of life is born of the awareness of death, of the dread of it.

I have the idea that lyric poetry is a poetry that's driven by a sense of the presence of death. That there's something unbearable about the fact that we're going to die and that we can't stand it and I think you find that out in childhood and you don't really - at least I found it out in childhood and I found it hard to get over.

Life is a hurdle and you'll never clear it. Death is the end of the ride and you fear it.

As one gets older, this question of death, becomes more vexing and urgent.