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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

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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
Every
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Scene
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Three
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Screenplays
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More quotes by David Mamet

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I was fortunate enough to have a rambling youth.
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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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Life in the movie business is like the beginning of a new love affair: it's full of surprises, and you're constantly getting f***ed.
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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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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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Always do things the least interesting way, the most blunt way, and you make a better movie. This is my experience.
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I'm greedy and ambitious like everybody else.
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You know, young actors say all the time, 'Should I use my own life experience?' And my response is, 'What choice do you have?'
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The avant-garde is to the left what jingoism is to the right. Both are a refuge in nonsense.
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We recipients of the boon of liberty have always been ready, when faced with discomfort, to discard any and all first principles of liberty, and, further, to indict those who do not freely join with us in happily arrogating those principles.
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When we fear things I think that we wish for them ... every fear hides a wish
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What I value most in my friends is loyalty.
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If, indeed, a firearm were more dangerous to its possessors than to potential aggressors, would it not make sense for the government to arm all criminals, and let them accidentally shoot themselves? Is this absurd? Yes, and yet the government, of course, is arming criminals.
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We Americans have always considered Hollywood, at best, a sinkhole of depraved venality. And, of course, it is. It is not a protective monastery of aesthetic truth. It is a place where everything is incredibly expensive.
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The great movie can be as free of being a record of the progress of the protagonist as is a dream.
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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.
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I love Superman. I'm a big fan of anyone who can make his living in his underwear.
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The terror and beauty of the dream come from the connection of previously unrelated mundanities of life.
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In a restaurant one is both observed and unobserved. Joy and sorrow can be displayed and observed unwittingly, the writer scowling naively and the diners wondering, What the hell is he doing?
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I love working on a typewriter - the rhythm, the sound it's like playing the piano, which I do, too.
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