David Mamet Quotes

It is the objective of the protagonist that keeps us in our seats.

It's upsetting to be a man in our society.

I've been alienating my public since I was 20 years old.

A dramatic experience concerned with the mundane may inform but it cannot release; and one concerned essentially with the aesthetic politics of its creators may divert or anger, but it cannot enlighten.

It is the writer’s job to make the play interesting. It is the actor’s job to make the performance truthful.

People only speak to get something.

When you come into the theatre, you have to be willing to say, 'We're all here to undergo a communion, to find out what the hell is going on in this world.' If you're not willing to say that, what you get is entertainment instead of art, and poor entertainment at that.

Get into the scene late; get out of the scene early.

Each culture has its own form of staged combat, evolved from its particular method of street fighting and cleaned up for presentation as a spectacle, e.g. savate, Cornish wrestling, karate, kung-fu.

It’s not a lie. It’s a gift for fiction.

I grew up in a tough neighborhood and we used to say you can get further with a kind word and a gun than just a kind word.

If you're neurotic and you think, I'm not where I deserve to be or my mother didn't love me, or blah, blah, blah, that lie, that neurotic vision, takes over your life and you're plagued by it 'til it's cleansed. In a play, at the end of the play, the lie is revealed. [T]he better the play is, the more surprising and inevitable the lie is, as Aristotle told us. Plays are about lies.

Consider: for all the gobbledegook [film studio] executives spout about backstory, all that we, the audience, want to know is what happens next. That's the only thing that's going on. . . . Character is nothing other than action, and character-driven means The plot stinks, and you'd better hope the star is popular enough to open the movie in spite of it.

Like Lincoln said: "If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong," and I feel the same way about the leftist dismantling of the West. If that's not wrong, then nothing is wrong.

Every reiteration of the idea that nothing matters debases the human spirit.

If you find that a point cannot be made without narration, it is virtually certain that the point is unimportant to the story (which is to say, to the audience).

Worry is interest paid in advance on a debt that never comes due.

Make the audience wonder what's going on by putting them in the same position as the protagonist.