Top 238 Quotes & Sayings by David Mamet - Page 3

Society functions in a way much more interesting than the multiple-choice pattern we have been rewarded for succeeding at in school. Success in life comes not from the ability to choose between the four presented answers, but from the rather more difficult and painfully acquired ability to formulate the questions.

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

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.

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

As long as the protagonist wants something, the audience will want something.

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.

The conscious mind is going to suggest the obvious, the cliché, because these things have offered the security of having succeeded in the past.

People only speak to get something. If I say, Let me tell you a few things about myself, already your defenses go up; you go, Look, I wonder what he wants from me, because no one ever speaks except to obtain an objective. That's the only reason anyone ever opens their mouth, onstage or offstage. They may use a language that seems revealing, but if so, it's just coincidence, because what they're trying to do is accomplish an objective.

The study of acting consists in the main of getting out of one’s own way, and in learning to deal with uncertainty and being comfortable being uncomfortable.

The realization that I came to is that each citizen for himself or herself understands the economics, which is, "I better make more than I spend and I better put something aside for a rainy day, and I want to get a good idea about what to do with the surplus so that perhaps it can grow while I'm sleeping." And that that's capitalism. Everybody practices it, but half of the country - those on the left - deny that it's true.

Before you can steal fire from the Gods you gotta be able to get coffee for the director.

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.

No one enjoys being equal.

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

The audience perceives only what the actor wants to do to the other actor.

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

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

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

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

The audience requires not information but drama.

I love Superman. I'm a big fan of anyone who can make his living in his underwear.

The most charming of theories holds that someone other than Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare's plays -- that he was of too low a state, and of insufficient education. But where in the wide history of the world do we find art created by the excessively wealthy, powerful, or educated?

Characters on stage, like people in what we refer to as "real life," do not speak to reveal themselves. They do not speak to conceal themselves. They speak to get whatever it is that they want. It is the only reason they speak.

The true writer must write not the acceptable but the true.

Don't write stage directions. If it is not apparent what the character is trying to accomplish by saying the line, tell us how the character said it or whether or not she moved to the couch isn't going to aid the case.

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

Art is about the spontaneous connection of the artist to his own unconscious - about insight beyond reason. If his insight were reasonable, anyone could do it, but anyone cannot. Only few can, and they are called.

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

Everybody makes their own fun. If you don't make it yourself, it isn't fun. It's entertainment.

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

We live in oppressive times. We have, as a nation, become our own thought police; but instead of calling the process by which we limit our expression of dissent and wonder ‘censorship,’ we call it ‘concern for commercial viability.

We recipients of the boon of liberty have always been ready, when faced with discomfort, to discard any and all first principles of liberty, and, further, to indict those who do not freely join with us in happily arrogating those principles.

My alma mater is the Chicago Public Library.

A novel it's different. It's kind of exhilarating not to have to cut to the bone constantly. Oh, well I can go over here for a moment. I can say what I think the guy was thinking or what the day looked like or what the bird was doing. If you do that as a playwright, you're dead.

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.

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

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.

There is no such thing as character other than the habitual action, as Mr. Aristotle told us two thousand years ago.

All rhetorical questions are accusations.

You know, I once read an interesting book which said that, uh, most people lost in the wilds, they, they die of shame. Yeah, see, they die of shame. 'What did I do wrong? How could I have gotten myself into this?' And so they sit there and they... die. Because they didn't do the one thing that would save their lives. Thinking.

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

We cannot live without trade. A society can neither advance nor improve without excess of disposable income. This excess can only be amassed through the production of goods and services necessary or attractive to the mass. A financial system which allows this leads to inequality; one that does not leads to mass starvation.

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.

Every fear hides a wish.

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.

We cannot live in peace without Law. And though law cannot be perfect, it may be just if it is written in ignorance of the identity of the claimants and applied equally to all. Then it is a possession not only of the claimants but of the society, which may now base its actions upon a reasonable assumption of the law?s treatment.

Invent nothing, deny nothing, speak up, stand up, stay out of school.

The purpose of technique is to free the unconscious. If you follow the rules ploddingly, they will allow your unconscious to be free.

I tend to write a lot, which I think is the secret to being prolific.

Show business is and has always been a depraved carnival.

If You can't tell it to me in one sentence, they can't put it in TV Guide.

Do not internalize the industrial model. You are not one of the myriad interchangeable pieces, but a unique human being, and if you've got something to say, say it, and think well of yourself while you're learning to say it better.

At the Neighborhood Playhouse School of Theatre, Sanford Meisner said, 'When you go into the professional world, at a stock theatre somewhere, backstage, you will meet an older actor, someone who has been around awhile. He will tell you tales and anecdotes, about life in the theatre. He will speak to you about your performance and the performances of others, and he will generalize to you, based on his experience and his intuitions, about the laws of the stage. Ignore this man!'

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

Everyone needs money. That's why they call it money

Acting is not a genteel profession. Actors used to be buried at a crossroads with a stake through the heart. Those people's performances so troubled the onlookers that they feared their ghosts. An awesome compliment. Those players moved the audience not such that they were admitted to a school, or received a complimentary review, but such that the audience feared for their soul. Now that seems to me something to aim for.

When we fear things I think that we wish for them ... every fear hides a wish

Don't assume I'm dumb because I wear a suit and tie.

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

We respond to a drama to that extent to which it corresponds to our dream life.