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A good film script should be able to do completely without dialogue.

David Mamet

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David Mamet
Age: 76
Born: 1947
Born: November 30
Actor
Author
Film Director
Film Producer
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Television Producer
Theatrical Director
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
David Alen Mamet
David Alan Mamet
Able
Without
Good
Script
Dialogue
Scripts
Completely
Movie
Film

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Luck, if there is such a thing, is either going to favor everyone equally or going to exhibit a preference for the prepared.
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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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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.
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What I value most in my friends is loyalty.
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Show business is and has always been a depraved carnival.
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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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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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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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All of us. All of us. We're doomed.
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Being among my people is a delight. We Jews live among ourselves. I love it.
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Every reiteration of the idea that nothing matters debases the human spirit.
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I don't really have a social life.
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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.
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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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They say the definition of ambivalence is watching your mother-in-law drive over a cliff in your new Cadillac.
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Hitchcock denigrated American films, saying they were all 'pictures of people talking' - as, indeed, most of them are.
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We must have a pie. Stress cannot exist in the presence of a pie.
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A novel it's different. It's kind of exhilarating not to have to cut to the bone constantly. Oh, well I can go over here for a moment. I can say what I think the guy was thinking or what the day looked like or what the bird was doing. If you do that as a playwright, you're dead.
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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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Listen, here's the thing about an English degree - if you sat somebody down and asked them to make a list of the writers they admire over the last hundred years, see how many of them got a degree in English.
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