David Mamet Quotes

Our job, as writers is to do our jobs.

There is a profound and ineradicable taint of antisemitism in the British.

You get rich through luck. You get rich through crime. You get rich through fulfilling the needs of another. You can be as greedy as you like. If you can’t do one of those three things, you ain’t going to get any money.

Always tell the truth - it's the easiest thing to remember.

A good film script should be able to do completely without dialogue.

I've always been fascinated by the picaresque.

I was fortunate enough to have a rambling youth.

Before you can steal fire from the Gods you gotta be able to get coffee for the director.

The basis of drama is... the struggle of the hero towards a specific goal at the end of which he realises that what kept him from it was, in the lesser drama, civilisation and, in the great drama, the discovery of something that he did not set out to discover but which can be seen retrospectively as inevitable.

My greatest fear is that the audience will beat me to the punch line.

The terror and beauty of the dream come from the connection of previously unrelated mundanities of life.

Art and mass entertainment and propaganda, they can all be plotted on the same graph, but there is a difference.

There is no such thing as character other than the habitual action, as Mr. Aristotle told us two thousand years ago.

Film is a collaborative business: bend over.

The first amendment ensures not that speech will be fair, but that it will be free. It cannot be both.

As you all know first prize is a Cadillac El Dorado. Anyone wanna see second prize? Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you're fired.

Cultivate a love of skill. Learn theatrical skills. They will give you continual pleasure, self-confidence, and link you to fifty thousand years of the history of our profession.

If the scene bores you when you read it, rest assured it WILL bore the actors, and will then bore the audience, and we're all going to be back in the breadline.

My alma mater is the Chicago Public Library.

Every scene should be able to answer three questions: "Who wants what from whom? What happens if they don't get it? Why now?"

I go out there. I'm out there every day. [Pause] There is nothing out there.

They say you can't study Kabbalah until you are at least 40 years old. You know why? You have to have experienced at least one generation making the same mistakes as the previous one.

War is tragedy. The great war stories are tragedies. It's the failure of diplomacy. 'War and Peace,' 'A Farewell to Arms,' 'For Whom the Bell Tolls.' Those are some of the greatest tragedies.

Art is about the spontaneous connection of the artist to his own unconscious - about insight beyond reason. If his insight were reasonable, anyone could do it, but anyone cannot. Only few can, and they are called.

A liberal pretending to be a conservative? That's like a straight person pretending to be gay to get greater acceptance.

I pray you indulge me for a space, for I am going to set out on a speech which may have some duration, but whose theme may be gleaned from its opening phrase: how dare you.

The individual is not only best qualified to provide his own personal defense, he is the only one qualified to do so: and his right to do so is guaranteed by the Constitution.

There's nothing in the world more silent than the telephone the morning after everybody pans your play. It won't ring from room service; your mother won't be calling you. If the phone has not rung by 8 in the morning, you're dead.

The correct unit of study is not the play; it is the scene.

The main question in drama, the way I was taught, is always, 'What does the protagonist want?' That's what drama is. It comes down to that. It's not about theme, it's not about ideas, it's not about setting, but what the protagonist wants.

My alma mater is the Chicago Public Library. I got what little educational foundation I got in the third-floor reading room, under the tutelage of a Coca-Cola sign.

Welcome to Chicago. This town stinks like a whorehouse at low tide.

I'm entitled to my political opinions, and I get to vote because I'm an American.

Roll back the clock, and every possession of every great country started with a crime.

In my family, in the days prior to television, we liked to while away the evenings by making ourselves miserable, solely based on our ability to speak the language viciously.

No one enjoys being equal.

I love working on a typewriter - the rhythm, the sound; it's like playing the piano, which I do, too.

In a restaurant one is both observed and unobserved. Joy and sorrow can be displayed and observed "unwittingly," the writer scowling naively and the diners wondering, What the hell is he doing?

President Obama seems to understand the Constitution as a 'set of suggestions.'

To find beauty in the sad, hope in the midst of loss, and dignity in failure is great poetic art.

They say the definition of ambivalence is watching your mother-in-law drive over a cliff in your new Cadillac.

Forget narrative, backstory, characterisation, exposition, all of that. Just make the audience want to know what happens next.

You can't write about history without writing about politics at some point. History is about movements of people. 'What is criminality and what is government' is a theme that runs through every history.

I understand that computers, which I once believed to be but a hermaphrodite typewriter-cum-filing cabinet, offer the cyber literate increased ability to communicate. I do not think this is altogether a bad thing, however it may appear on the surface.

What I value most in my friends is loyalty.

Encounter: Doubt, Shame, Humiliation. It will finally be worth it. Acting is more about courage than anything else.

I've been alienating my public since I was 20 years old. When 'American Buffalo' came out on Broadway, people would storm out and say, 'How dare he use that kind of language!' Of course I'm alienating the public! That's what they pay me for.

The realization that I came to is that each citizen for himself or herself understands the economics, which is, "I better make more than I spend and I better put something aside for a rainy day, and I want to get a good idea about what to do with the surplus so that perhaps it can grow while I'm sleeping." And that that's capitalism. Everybody practices it, but half of the country - those on the left - deny that it's true.