David Mamet Quotes

The work of the director is the work of constructing the shot list from the script.

Almost all movie scripts contain material that cannot be filmed.

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

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

Life in the movie business is like the beginning of a new love affair: it's full of surprises, and you're constantly getting f***ed.

One can read all one wants, and spend eternities in front of a blackboard with a tutor, but one is not going to learn to swim until one gets in the water.

We all hope. It's what keeps us alive.

I'm greedy and ambitious like everybody else.

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

The pain of losing is diverting. So is the thrill of winning. Winning, however, is lonelier, as those you've won money from are not likely to commiserate with you. Winning takes getting used to.

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.

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.

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.

We're all put to the test... but it never comes in the form or at the point we would prefer, does it?

Put. That coffee. Down. Coffee's for closers only.

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.

People only speak to get something.

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

Any time two characters are talking about a third, the scene is a crock of s***.

I took the liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind.

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

Where in the wide history of the world do we find art created by the excessively wealthy, powerful, or educated?

Fun is what you do for yourself. If somebody else does it, it's entertainment.

Culture exists and evolves to relegate to habit categories of interactions the constant conscious reference to which would make human interaction impossible.

You wanna know how to get Capone? They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That's the Chicago way! And that's how you get Capone.

I like Bach. I like Randy Newman.

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

The Israelis would like to live in peace within their borders; the Arabs would like to kill them all.

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

Hitchcock denigrated American films, saying they were all 'pictures of people talking' - as, indeed, most of them are.

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

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.

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.

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.'

I don't really have a social life.

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

Our job, as writers is to do our jobs.

When I started out I was a failed actor.

It's hard to write a good plot, it's very hard.

Being among my people is a delight. We Jews live among ourselves. I love it.

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.

What we're trying to do is find two or more shots the juxtaposition of which will give us the idea.

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

You don't know what life is. You know nothing.

I'm responding to the will of the people.

All of us. All of us. We're doomed.

Blasphemy and prayer are one. Both assert the existence of a superior power. The first, however, with conviction.

Movies were never an art form, they were entertainment. It just evolved into an art form from there, and it's still evolving in different ways.

You can't rely on the acting to tell the story.

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