David Mamet Quotes
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I'm afraid of only two things: being lazy and being cowardly.
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When I started out I was a failed actor.
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Liberalism is a religion. Its tenets cannot be proved, its capacity for waste and destruction demonstrated. But it affords a feeling of spiritual rectitude at little or no cost.
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Then I'm over the fucking top and you owe me a Cadillac. And I don't want any fucking shit and I don't give a shit.
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Writing a novel is an incredibly free experience. One puts one's self in a narrative mode. You can go off in any direction - the past, the future, or go laterally, or include one's own beliefs. It's total freedom.
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I know very well what it is to be out of work and to be cheated by employers and I know what it is to be an employer.
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Where have you been, Shelly? Bruce and Harriet Nyborg. Do you want to see the memos...? They're nuts... they used to call in every week ... Did you see how they were living? ... The people are insane. They just like talking to salesmen.
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President Obama seems to understand the Constitution as a 'set of suggestions.'
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It's hard to write a good plot, it's very hard.
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What I value most in my friends is loyalty.
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In my family, in the days prior to television, we liked to while away the evenings by making ourselves miserable, solely based on our ability to speak the language viciously.
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Always tell the truth - it's the easiest thing to remember.
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The main question in drama, the way I was taught, is always, 'What does the protagonist want?' That's what drama is. It comes down to that. It's not about theme, it's not about ideas, it's not about setting, but what the protagonist wants.
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My alma mater is the Chicago Public Library.
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I didn't knowingly meet a conservative until, to my shame, I was 60 years old and sat down and said, 'Wow, I don't understand what this guy's talking about, but he has a great civility about him. Perhaps I better investigate this thing.'
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My tendency as an actor was to correct people, was to say, 'What if we tried it this way, what about if we tried that way?' That's terrible habit for an actor, but that's a good habit for director. So I became a director.
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They say you can't study Kabbalah until you are at least 40 years old. You know why? You have to have experienced at least one generation making the same mistakes as the previous one.
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We don't have to worry about making it interesting; all we have to worry about is getting rid of the pig.
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Or me lying in the... Let me tell ya... Lying in bed the next day, she brought me cafe au lait, she gives me a cigarette. My balls feel like concrete. Eh?
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Roll back the clock, and every possession of every great country started with a crime.
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My greatest fear is that the audience will beat me to the punch line.
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I find out whose fuckin' cousin you are, I'm gonna go to him and figure out a way to have your ass, FUCK YOU!
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It is not the constitutional prerogative of the Government to determine needs.
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That's fucked. That's fucked. You don't look at the fucking percentage. You look at the gross.