Top 238 Quotes & Sayings by David Mamet - Page 4

I don't have any experience with film schools. I suspect that they're useless, because I've had experience with drama schools, and have found them to be useless.

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

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

Storytelling is like sex. We all do it naturally. Some of us are better at it than others.

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 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.

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.

A man stands alone at the plate. This is the time for what? For individual achievement. There he stands alone. But in the field, what? Part of a team.

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.

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

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

Almost all movie scripts contain material that cannot be filmed.

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

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.

Let the cut tell the story. Otherwise you have not got dramatic action, you've got narration.

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

It is to a dramatist, which is to say, to an unfrocked psychoanalyst, stunning that that which has sustained the Left in my generation, its avatar, its prime issue, has been abortion. For, whether or not it is regarded as a woman's right, an unfortunate necessity, or murder, which is to say, irrespective of differing and legitimate political views, to enshrine it as the most important test of the Liberal, is, mythologically, an assertion to the ultimate right of a postreligious Paganism.

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

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

You got an all-out prize fight, you wait 'til the fight's over, one guy's left standing and that's how you know who's won.

Here is a sovereign talisman against regret: never do that which might engender it.

The dream and the film are the juxtaposition of images in order to answer a question.

Anyone can write five people trapped in a snowstorm. The question is how you get them into the snowstorm. 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. To think of a plot that is, as Aristotle says, surprising and yet inevitable, is a lot, lot, lot of work.

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).

It is the objective of the protagonist that keeps us in our seats.

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.

Make the audience wonder what's going on by putting them in the same position as the protagonist.

In playwriting, you've got to be able to write dialogue. And if you write enough of it and let it flow enough, you'll probably come across something that will give you a key as to structure. I think the process of writing a play is working back and forth between the moment and the whole. The moment and the whole, the fluidity of the dialogue and the necessity of a strict construction. Letting one predominate for a while and coming back and fixing it so that eventually what you do, like a pastry chef, is frost your mistakes, if you can.

If you find that a point cannot be made without narration, it is virtually certain that the point is unimportant to the story (which is to say, to the audience).

I'm responding to the will of the people.

The popularity of disaster movies expresses a collective perception of a world threatened by irresistible and unforeseen forces which nevertheless are thwarted at the last moment. Their thinly veiled symbolic meaning might be translated thus: We are innocent of wrongdoing. We are attacked by unforeseeable forces come to harm us. We are, thus, innocent even of negligence. Though those forces are insuperable, chance will come to our aid and we shall emerge victorious.

How can I be secure? Through amassing wealth beyond all measure? No. And what's beyond measure? That's a sickness. That's a trap. There is no measure. Only greed.

Film is a collaborative business: bend over.

The great movie can be as free of being a record of the progress of the protagonist as is a dream.

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.

As you all know first prize is a Cadillac El Dorado. Anyone wanna see second prize? Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you're fired.

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.

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

The mind is a mill which can incessant turn, 'til its mere operation focus the stress inward and the stones grind themselves to dust.

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

Freud believed that our dreams sometimes recapitulate a speech, a comment we've heard or something that we've read. I always had compositions in my dreams. They would be a joke, a piece of a novel, a witticism or a piece of dialogue from a play, and I would dream them. I would actually express them line by line in the dream. Sometimes after waking up I would remember a snatch or two and write them down. There's something in me that just wants to create dialogue.

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

"Based on a true story" is a come-on, the aesthetic equivalent of "no loan request refused." For, at best, the creator has fashioned a film based on his understanding of, interpretation of, and reduction of the report of an actual occurrence.

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

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?

I go out there. I'm out there every day. [Pause] There is nothing out there.

IF YOU PRETEND THE CHARACTERS CANT SPEAK, AND WRITE A SILENT MOVIE, YOU WILL BE WRITING GREAT DRAMA.

Any claim to actual identification as a drama must rest upon the construction of a plot independent of the assignment of affliction to the protagonist.

The secret knowledge is there's nobody home but us chickens. The Constitution was written by a bunch of regular guys who tried to get together and thrash out a contract under which they could get together that would keep people together.

Every reiteration of the idea that _nothing matters_ debases the human spirit. Every reiteration of the idea that there is no drama in modern life, there is only dramatization, that there is no tragedy, there is only unexplained misfortune, debases us. It denies what we know to be true. In denying what we know, we are as a nation which cannot remember its dreams--like an unhappy person who cannot remember his dreams and so denies that he does dream, and denies that there are such things as dreams.

I've been training in Jiu-jitsu for about six years and I'm very fortunate to live in that world. All the fighters hang out and have lunch together just about every day and trade stories. And I've always been fascinated how in the world of Jiu-jitsu in L.A. everybody in the fight world - cops, special forces, bouncers, stuntmen - connected across different lines.

Consider: for all the gobbledegook [film studio] executives spout about backstory, all that we, the audience, want to know is what happens next. That's the only thing that's going on. . . . Character is nothing other than action, and character-driven means The plot stinks, and you'd better hope the star is popular enough to open the movie in spite of it.

The pursuit of Fashion is the attempt of the middle class to co-opt tragedy. In adopting the clothing, speech, and personal habits of those in straitened, dangerous, or pitiful circumstances, the middle class seeks to have what it feels to be the exigent and nonequivocal experiences had by those it emulates.

Always do things the least interesting way, the most blunt way, and you make a better movie. This is my experience.

It’s not a lie. It’s a gift for fiction.

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

Many players will not improve because they cannot bear self-knowledge.