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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.

David Mamet

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David Mamet
Age: 76
Born: 1947
Born: November 30
Actor
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Film Director
Film Producer
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Television Producer
Theatrical Director
Writer
Chicago
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David Alen Mamet
David Alan Mamet
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More quotes by David Mamet

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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.'
David Mamet
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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.
David Mamet
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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.
David Mamet
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To find beauty in the sad, hope in the midst of loss, and dignity in failure is great poetic art.
David Mamet
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A man stands alone at the plate. This is the time for what? For individual achievement. There he stands alone. But in the field, what? Part of a team.
David Mamet
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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.
David Mamet
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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.
David Mamet
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What I value most in my friends is loyalty.
David Mamet
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I'm afraid of only two things: being lazy and being cowardly.
David Mamet
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The study of acting consists in the main of getting out of one’s own way, and in learning to deal with uncertainty and being comfortable being uncomfortable.
David Mamet
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Blasphemy and prayer are one. Both assert the existence of a superior power. The first, however, with conviction.
David Mamet
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Before you can steal fire from the Gods you gotta be able to get coffee for the director.
David Mamet
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It is the writer’s job to make the play interesting. It is the actor’s job to make the performance truthful.
David Mamet
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Always do things the least interesting way, the most blunt way, and you make a better movie. This is my experience.
David Mamet
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The secret knowledge is there's nobody home but us chickens. The Constitution was written by a bunch of regular guys who tried to get together and thrash out a contract under which they could get together that would keep people together.
David Mamet
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Here is a sovereign talisman against regret: never do that which might engender it.
David Mamet
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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.
David Mamet
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Here's what happens in a play. You get involved in a situation where something is unbalanced. If nothing's unbalanced, there's no reason to have a play. If Hamlet comes home from school, and his dad's not dead and asks him if he's had a good time, it's boring. But if something's unbalanced, it must be returned to order.
David Mamet
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The most charming of theories holds that someone other than Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare's plays -- that he was of too low a state, and of insufficient education. But where in the wide history of the world do we find art created by the excessively wealthy, powerful, or educated?
David Mamet
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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?
David Mamet