David Mamet Quotes
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I hate the computer. I hate their spell-check. I won't ever do e-mail.
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You can't write about history without writing about politics at some point. History is about movements of people. 'What is criminality and what is government' is a theme that runs through every history.
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I love working on a typewriter - the rhythm, the sound; it's like playing the piano, which I do, too.
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My idea of perfect happiness is a healthy family, peace between nations, and all the critics die.
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You know, young actors say all the time, 'Should I use my own life experience?' And my response is, 'What choice do you have?'
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I like Bach. I like Randy Newman.
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The basis of drama is... the struggle of the hero towards a specific goal at the end of which he realises that what kept him from it was, in the lesser drama, civilisation and, in the great drama, the discovery of something that he did not set out to discover but which can be seen retrospectively as inevitable.
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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.
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I'm greedy and ambitious like everybody else.
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It's only words... unless they're true.
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Yes, well that's very cute, but you're running this office like a bunch of bullshit.
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The Israelis would like to live in peace within their borders; the Arabs would like to kill them all.
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A play is basically a long, formalistic polemic. You can write it without the poetry, and if you do, you may have a pretty good play. We know this because we see plays in translation. Not many people speak Norwegian or Danish or whatever guys like Ibsen spoke, or Russian - yet we understand Chekhov and the others.
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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.'
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The quality I most admire in a man is steadfastness.
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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.
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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.
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I love the British.
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Films have degenerated to their original operation as carnival amusement - they offer not drama but thrills.
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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.
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In Chicago, we love our crooks!
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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.
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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.
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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.