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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.

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
Jobs
Opinions
Write
Tells
Political
Wrote
Hands
Piece
Writing
Novel
Woolf
Would
Pieces
Inappropriate
Hand
Virginia
Opinion
Influenced

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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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Based on a true story is a come-on, the aesthetic equivalent of no loan request refused. For, at best, the creator has fashioned a film based on his understanding of, interpretation of, and reduction of the report of an actual occurrence.
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The pursuit of Fashion is the attempt of the middle class to co-opt tragedy. In adopting the clothing, speech, and personal habits of those in straitened, dangerous, or pitiful circumstances, the middle class seeks to have what it feels to be the exigent and nonequivocal experiences had by those it emulates.
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Every fear hides a wish.
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Let the cut tell the story. Otherwise you have not got dramatic action, you've got narration.
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What we're trying to do is find two or more shots the juxtaposition of which will give us the idea.
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Being a writer in Hollywood is like going to Hitler's Eagle Nest with a great idea for a bar mitzvah.
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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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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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They say the definition of ambivalence is watching your mother-in-law drive over a cliff in your new Cadillac.
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If the scene bores you when you read it, rest assured it WILL bore the actors, and will then bore the audience, and we're all going to be back in the breadline.
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Invent nothing, deny nothing, speak up, stand up, stay out of school.
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Show business is and has always been a depraved carnival.
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They have a desire to put on plays and to fulfill that traditional role of a theater in a community: to be the place where people go to hear the truth.
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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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Every scene should be able to answer three questions: Who wants what from whom? What happens if they don't get it? Why now?
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Roll back the clock, and every possession of every great country started with a crime.
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The correct unit of study is not the play it is the scene.
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Being among my people is a delight. We Jews live among ourselves. I love it.
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