Top 238 Quotes & Sayings by David Mamet - Page 2

Our job, as writers is to do our jobs.

Here's what happens in a play. You get involved in a situation where something is unbalanced. If nothing's unbalanced, there's no reason to have a play. If Hamlet comes home from school, and his dad's not dead and asks him if he's had a good time, it's boring. But if something's unbalanced, it must be returned to order.

I hate the computer. I hate their spell-check. I won't ever do e-mail.

I won't ever do e-mail.

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.

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 honest man might observe... that no one gets something for nothing; that politicians go in poor and go out rich; that the Government screws up everything it touches; and that the Will to Believe is best confined to the Religious Venue, as to practice it elsewhere is just too damned expensive.

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 like Bach. I like Randy Newman.

The product of the artist has become less important than the fact of the artist. We wish to absorb this person. We wish to devour someone who has experienced the tragic. In our society this person is much more important than anything he might create.

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.

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

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.

I hate vacations. There's nothing to do.

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

I know very well what it is to be out of work and to be cheated by employers and I know what it is to be an employer.

When I started out I was a failed actor.

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 liberals in my neighbourhood wouldn't give away Brentwood to the Palestinians, but they want to give away Tel Aviv.

I was fortunate enough to have a rambling youth.

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

The essence of jiu-jitsu is philosophy.

I didn't knowingly meet a conservative until, to my shame, I was 60 years old and sat down and said, 'Wow, I don't understand what this guy's talking about, but he has a great civility about him. Perhaps I better investigate this thing.'

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.'

If, indeed, a firearm were more dangerous to its possessors than to potential aggressors, would it not make sense for the government to arm all criminals, and let them accidentally shoot themselves? Is this absurd? Yes, and yet the government, of course, is arming criminals.

I look back upon 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.

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

In Chicago, we love our crooks!

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

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

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

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.

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.

We Americans have always considered Hollywood, at best, a sinkhole of depraved venality. And, of course, it is. It is not a protective monastery of aesthetic truth. It is a place where everything is incredibly expensive.

I don't really have a social life.

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 hard for a Jew of my generation, an American Jew, who is philo-Zionistic, not to romanticize Israel.

I'm greedy and ambitious like everybody else.

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.

The quality I most admire in a man is steadfastness.

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

I'm not an ascetic.

I've always been fascinated by the picaresque.

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

In a world we find terrifying, we ratify that which doesn't threaten us.

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

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

Having spent too many years in show business, the one thing I see that succeeds is persistence. It's the person who just ain't gonna go home. I decided early on that I wasn't going to go home. This is what I'll be doing until they put me in jail or in a coffin.

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.

The audience will teach you how to act and the audience will teach you how to write and to direct. The classroom will teach you how to obey, and obedience in the theatre will get you nowhere. It’s a soothing falsity.

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

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.

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.

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.

I examined my Liberalism and found it like an addiction to roulette. Here, though the odds are plain, and the certainty of loss apparent to anyone with a knowledge of arithmetic, the addict, failing time and again, is convinced he yet is graced with the power to contravene natural laws. The roulette addict, when he invariably comes to grief, does not examine either the nature of roulette, or of his delusion, but retires to develop a new system, and to scheme for more funds.

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

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

Train yourself for a profession that does not exist.