Words matter. These are the best David Mamet Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
Being among my people is a delight. We Jews live among ourselves. I love it.
I’m greedy and ambitious like everybody else.
It’s upsetting to be a man in our society.
The essence of jiu-jitsu is philosophy.
Obama is a tyrant the same way FDR was a tyrant. He has a view of presidential power that states: the government is in control of the country, and the president is in charge of the government. He’s taken an imperial view of the presidency.
A good film script should be able to do completely without dialogue.
I was fortunate enough to have a rambling youth.
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.
I’m not the guy to ask about politics. I’m a gag writer.
I took the liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind.
It’s hard for a Jew of my generation, an American Jew, who is philo-Zionistic, not to romanticize Israel.
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.
Old age and treachery will always beat youth and exuberance.
There’s something in me that just wants to create dialogue.
I’m entitled to my political opinions, and I get to vote because I’m an American.
I’ve always been more comfortable sinking while clutching a good theory than swimming with an ugly fact.
It is not the constitutional prerogative of the Government to determine needs.
One person may need (or want) more leisure, another more work; one more adventure, another more security, and so on. It is this diversity that makes a country, indeed a state, a city, a church, or a family, healthy. ‘One-size-fits-all,’ and that size determined by the State has a name, and that name is ‘slavery.’
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.
When we leave the play saying how spectacular the sets or costumes were, or how interesting the ideas, it means we had a bad time.
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.
Our job, as writers is to do our jobs.
In a world we find terrifying, we ratify that which doesn’t threaten us.
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.
My definition of a ‘friend’ is, coming from Chicago, someone who says, ‘Yeah, sure. You know what? Let’s talk about what we can talk about. Let’s help each other out. Your politics are none of my business.’
Art and mass entertainment and propaganda, they can all be plotted on the same graph, but there is a difference.
If you’re writing an opinion piece, it’s your job to write your opinion. If, on the other hand, you wrote a novel, as Virginia Woolf tells us, it would be inappropriate if you let your novel be influenced by your political opinions.
It’s only words… unless they’re true.
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.
I’m afraid of only two things: being lazy and being cowardly.
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.
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 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.
Films have degenerated to their original operation as carnival amusement – they offer not drama but thrills.
My greatest fear is that the audience will beat me to the punch line.
I love the British.
People may or may not say what they mean… but they always say something designed to get what they want.
Always tell the truth – it’s the easiest thing to remember.
I used to think I’d like to be a fireman – in fact, I still would – and the only drawback I could see was coming back to the firehouse, after a day of fighting fires, and still having to put in an eight-hour day writing.
The so-called assault weapons ban is a hoax. It is a political appeal to the ignorant. The guns it supposedly banned have been illegal for 78 years. Did the ban make them ‘more’ illegal? The ban addresses only the appearance of weapons, not their operation.
A stage play is basically a form of uber-schizophrenia. You split yourself into two minds – one being the protagonist and the other being the antagonist. The playwright also splits himself into two other minds: the mind of the writer and the mind of the audience.
My idea of perfect happiness is a healthy family, peace between nations, and all the critics die.
My dad was an immigrant kid and a Democrat and a Jew, and we didn’t know any Republicans in our group. So I grew up Democratic. My dad was a labor lawyer – a very hardworking guy, a one-horse labor lawyer – and then I went to hippie college and lived in the bubble.
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.
The Founders recognized that Government is quite literally a necessary evil, that there must be opposition, between its various branches, and between political parties, for these are the only ways to temper the individual’s greed for power and the electorates’ desires for peace by submission to coercion or blandishment.
I’m not an ascetic.
You know, young actors say all the time, ‘Should I use my own life experience?’ And my response is, ‘What choice do you have?’
People only speak to get something.
I hate the computer. I hate their spell-check. I won’t ever do e-mail.
The liberals in my neighbourhood wouldn’t give away Brentwood to the Palestinians, but they want to give away Tel Aviv.
I’ve always been fascinated by the picaresque.
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.
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.
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.
