David Mamet Quotes

Films have degenerated to their original operation as carnival amusement - they offer not drama but thrills.

The Oscars demonstrate the will of the people to control and judge those they have elected to stand above them (much, perhaps, as in bygone days, an election celebrated the same).

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

When the three branches of government have failed to represent the citizenry and the mass of the media has failed to represent the citizenry, then the citizenry better represent the citizenry.

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

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

Opportunity may knock, but it seldom nags.

We must have a pie. Stress cannot exist in the presence of a pie.

People may or may not say what they mean... but they always say something designed to get what they want.

Being a writer in Hollywood is like going to Hitler's Eagle Nest with a great idea for a bar mitzvah.

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

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

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

The subject of drama is The Lie. At the end of the drama THE TRUTH -- which has been overlooked, disregarded, scorned, and denied -- prevails. And that is how we know the Drama is done.

Every fear hides a wish.

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

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?

Old age and treachery will always beat youth and exuberance.

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

Train yourself for a profession that does not exist.

The greater the intellect, the more ease in its misdirection.

Art is an expression of joy and awe. It is not an attempt to share one's virtues and accomplishments with the audience, but an act of selfless spirit.

My Alma mater is the Chicago Public Library.

You know, young actors say all the time, 'Should I use my own life experience?' And my response is, 'What choice do you have?'

A good writer gets better only by learning to cut, to remove the ornamental, the descriptive, the narrative, and especially the deeply felt and meaningful. What remains? The story remains.

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

Liberalism is a religion. Its tenets cannot be proved, its capacity for waste and destruction demonstrated. But it affords a feeling of spiritual rectitude at little or no cost.

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.

I've always been fascinated by the picaresque.

It's hard to write a good play because it's hard to structure a plot. If you can think of it off the top of your head, so can the audience.

They have a desire to put on plays and to fulfill that traditional role of a theater in a community: to be the place where people go to hear the truth.

All fears are one fear. Just the fear of death. And we accept it, then we are at peace.

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

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

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

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

The avant-garde is to the left what jingoism is to the right. Both are a refuge in nonsense.

What I value most in my friends is loyalty.

I've always been more comfortable sinking while clutching a good theory than swimming with an ugly fact.

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.

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

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

I was fortunate enough to have a rambling youth.

I look back on my liberal political beliefs with a sort of wonder - as another exercise in self-involvement - rewarding myself for some superiority I could not logically describe.

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

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.

The quality I most admire in a man is steadfastness.

All rhetorical questions are accusations.

I'm afraid of only two things: being lazy and being cowardly.

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