David Mamet Quotes
-
People may or may not say what they mean... but they always say something designed to get what they want.
-
I hate vacations. There's nothing to do.
-
There is a profound and ineradicable taint of antisemitism in the British.
-
I've always been more comfortable sinking while clutching a good theory than swimming with an ugly fact.
-
April to September it's me, it's no fucking Moss! Due respect... he's an order taker. Talks... oh, talks a good game. But look at the board, and it's me John. It's me.
-
You ever take a dump, made you feel you'd just slept for twelve hours?
-
The quality I most admire in a man is steadfastness.
-
It's hard for a Jew of my generation, an American Jew, who is philo-Zionistic, not to romanticize Israel.
-
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.
-
There's no such thing as talent; you just have to work hard enough.
-
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.
-
There's nothing in the world more silent than the telephone the morning after everybody pans your play. It won't ring from room service; your mother won't be calling you. If the phone has not rung by 8 in the morning, you're dead.
-
Before you can steal fire from the Gods you gotta be able to get coffee for the director
-
I'm afraid of only two things: being lazy and being cowardly. I get up early in the morning and go to work. I love to write.
-
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.'
-
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.
-
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.'
-
I'm not the guy to ask about politics. I'm a gag writer.
-
In a world we find terrifying, we ratify that which doesn't threaten us.
-
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.
-
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.
-
I'm afraid of only two things: being lazy and being cowardly.
-
I took the liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind.
-
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.