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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: 77
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
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Many
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Writers

More quotes by David Mamet

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I hate vacations. There's nothing to do.
David Mamet
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The purpose of technique is to free the unconscious. If you follow the rules ploddingly, they will allow your unconscious to be free.
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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Encounter: Doubt, Shame, Humiliation. It will finally be worth it. Acting is more about courage than anything else.
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One can read all one wants, and spend eternities in front of a blackboard with a tutor, but one is not going to learn to swim until one gets in the water.
David Mamet
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You can't rely on the acting to tell the story.
David Mamet
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Let the cut tell the story. Otherwise you have not got dramatic action, you've got narration.
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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War is tragedy. The great war stories are tragedies. It's the failure of diplomacy. 'War and Peace,' 'A Farewell to Arms,' 'For Whom the Bell Tolls.' Those are some of the greatest tragedies.
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What I value most in my friends is loyalty.
David Mamet
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Don't write stage directions. If it is not apparent what the character is trying to accomplish by saying the line, tell us how the character said it or whether or not she moved to the couch isn't going to aid the case.
David Mamet
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Hitchcock denigrated American films, saying they were all 'pictures of people talking' - as, indeed, most of them are.
David Mamet
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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.
David Mamet
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They say the definition of ambivalence is watching your mother-in-law drive over a cliff in your new Cadillac.
David Mamet
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Storytelling is like sex. We all do it naturally. Some of us are better at it than others.
David Mamet
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It is not the constitutional prerogative of the Government to determine needs.
David Mamet
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Welcome to Chicago. This town stinks like a whorehouse at low tide.
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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It's hard for a Jew of my generation, an American Jew, who is philo-Zionistic, not to romanticize Israel.
David Mamet
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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.
David Mamet