David Mamet Quotes

I love all insider memoirs. It doesn't matter whether it's truck-drivers or doctors. I think everybody likes to go backstage, find out what people think and what they talk about and what specialised job they have.

I don't think there's any information to be gotten from television.

When we fear things I think that we wish for them ... every fear hides a wish

Luck, if there is such a thing, is either going to favor everyone equally or going to exhibit a preference for the prepared.

Writing a novel is an incredibly free experience. One puts one's self in a narrative mode. You can go off in any direction - the past, the future, or go laterally, or include one's own beliefs. It's total freedom.

The purpose of technique is to free the unconscious. If you follow the rules ploddingly, they will allow your unconscious to be free.

The secret knowledge is there's nobody home but us chickens. The Constitution was written by a bunch of regular guys who tried to get together and thrash out a contract under which they could get together that would keep people together.

The job of the artist, is to say, wait a second, everything that we have thought is wrong. Let's re-examine it.

It is not the constitutional prerogative of the Government to determine needs.

The conscious mind is going to suggest the obvious, the cliché, because these things have offered the security of having succeeded in the past.

There's no such thing as talent; you just have to work hard enough.

In Chicago, we love our crooks!

I always thought the real violence in Hollywood isn't what's on the screen. It's what you have to do to raise the money.

"Based on a true story" is a come-on, the aesthetic equivalent of "no loan request refused." For, at best, the creator has fashioned a film based on his understanding of, interpretation of, and reduction of the report of an actual occurrence.

The government, for example, has determined that black people (somehow) have fewer abilities than white people, and, so, must be given certain preferences. Anyone acquainted with both black and white people knows this assessment is not only absurd but monstrous. And yet it is the law.

Society functions in a way much more interesting than the multiple-choice pattern we have been rewarded for succeeding at in school. Success in life comes not from the ability to choose between the four presented answers, but from the rather more difficult and painfully acquired ability to formulate the questions.

Anyone ever lost in the wild knows that nature wants you dead.

Old age and treachery will always beat youth and exuberance.

Invent nothing, deny nothing, speak up, stand up, stay out of school.

Train yourself for a profession that does not exist.

The images in a dream are vastly varied and magnificently interesting.

Don't write stage directions. If it is not apparent what the character is trying to accomplish by saying the line, tell us how the character said it or whether or not she moved to the couch isn't going to aid the case.

I'm greedy and ambitious like everybody else.

American football seems to resemble soccer in that one scores by putting the ball through the opponent's goal; but football, truly is about land. The Settlers want to move the line of scrimmage Westward, the Native Americans want to move it East.

The true writer must write not the acceptable but the true.

I know very well what it is to be out of work and to be cheated by employers and I know what it is to be an employer.

I hate vacations. There's nothing to do.

People ask me, 'What do you do?' And I tell them I'm a writer, but always with the silent reservation, 'I am, of course, not really a writer. Hemingway was a writer.'

Many players will not improve because they cannot bear self-knowledge.

The audience requires not information but drama.

We all die in the end, but there's no reason to die in the middle.

If You can't tell it to me in one sentence, they can't put it in TV Guide.

Let the cut tell the story. Otherwise you have not got dramatic action, you've got narration.

My tendency as an actor was to correct people, was to say, 'What if we tried it this way, what about if we tried that way?' That's terrible habit for an actor, but that's a good habit for director. So I became a director.

I'm not the guy to ask about politics. I'm a gag writer.

The essence of jiu-jitsu is philosophy.

I won't ever do e-mail.

At the Neighborhood Playhouse School of Theatre, Sanford Meisner said, 'When you go into the professional world, at a stock theatre somewhere, backstage, you will meet an older actor, someone who has been around awhile. He will tell you tales and anecdotes, about life in the theatre. He will speak to you about your performance and the performances of others, and he will generalize to you, based on his experience and his intuitions, about the laws of the stage. Ignore this man!'

For it is written that just as it is forbidden to partake of the forbidden, it is forbidden not to partake of the permitted.

Policemen so cherish their status as keepers of the peace and protectors of the public that they have occasionally been known to beat to death those citizens or groups who question that status.

Conservatives believe in smaller government and in the power of the electorate. So I think that we're less likely to try to use a dramatic forum to warp people's political views.

All rhetorical questions are accusations.

There's something in me that just wants to create dialogue.

The popularity of disaster movies expresses a collective perception of a world threatened by irresistible and unforeseen forces which nevertheless are thwarted at the last moment. Their thinly veiled symbolic meaning might be translated thus: We are innocent of wrongdoing. We are attacked by unforeseeable forces come to harm us. We are, thus, innocent even of negligence. Though those forces are insuperable, chance will come to our aid and we shall emerge victorious.

It's hard for a Jew of my generation, an American Jew, who is philo-Zionistic, not to romanticize Israel.

Here's what happens in a play. You get involved in a situation where something is unbalanced. If nothing's unbalanced, there's no reason to have a play. If Hamlet comes home from school, and his dad's not dead and asks him if he's had a good time, it's boring. But if something's unbalanced, it must be returned to order.

We live in oppressive times. We have, as a nation, become our own thought police; but instead of calling the process by which we limit our expression of dissent and wonder ‘censorship,’ we call it ‘concern for commercial viability.

It is to a dramatist, which is to say, to an unfrocked psychoanalyst, stunning that that which has sustained the Left in my generation, its avatar, its prime issue, has been abortion. For, whether or not it is regarded as a woman's right, an unfortunate necessity, or murder, which is to say, irrespective of differing and legitimate political views, to enshrine it as the most important test of the Liberal, is, mythologically, an assertion to the ultimate right of a postreligious Paganism.