David Mamet Quotes
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There is a profound and ineradicable taint of antisemitism in the British.
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I've always been more comfortable sinking while clutching a good theory than swimming with an ugly fact.
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Our job, as writers is to do our jobs.
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People may or may not say what they mean... but they always say something designed to get what they want.
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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.
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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.
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You ever take a dump, made you feel you'd just slept for twelve hours?
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The quality I most admire in a man is steadfastness.
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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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It's hard for a Jew of my generation, an American Jew, who is philo-Zionistic, not to romanticize Israel.
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Before you can steal fire from the Gods you gotta be able to get coffee for the director
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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.'
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There's no such thing as talent; you just have to work hard enough.
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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.
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I grew up in a tough neighborhood and we used to say you can get further with a kind word and a gun than just a kind word.
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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.
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I'm not the guy to ask about politics. I'm a gag writer.
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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.'
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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.
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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.
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We respond to a drama to that extent to which it corresponds to our dreamlife.
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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.
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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.
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I took the liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind.