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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: 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
Answers
Three
Happens
Screenplays
Film
Questioning
Able
Questions
Every
Answer
Scene
Wants

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Our job, as writers is to do our jobs.
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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.
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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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My dad was a labour lawyer, and the ideas that I grew up with - bad management, bad capitalism, robber barons - when I applied this to my own life, I saw that we are all on both sides of the coin.
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My alma mater is the Chicago Public Library.
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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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IF YOU PRETEND THE CHARACTERS CANT SPEAK, AND WRITE A SILENT MOVIE, YOU WILL BE WRITING GREAT DRAMA.
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You get rich through luck. You get rich through crime. You get rich through fulfilling the needs of another. You can be as greedy as you like. If you can’t do one of those three things, you ain’t going to get any money.
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All of us. All of us. We're doomed.
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I've been alienating my public since I was 20 years old.
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It is not the constitutional prerogative of the Government to determine needs.
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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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If You can't tell it to me in one sentence, they can't put it in TV Guide.
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Obama is a tyrant the same way FDR was a tyrant. He has a view of presidential power that states: the government is in control of the country, and the president is in charge of the government. He's taken an imperial view of the presidency.
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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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Every fear hides a wish.
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I was fortunate enough to have a rambling youth.
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.
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I didn't knowingly meet a conservative until, to my shame, I was 60 years old and sat down and said, 'Wow, I don't understand what this guy's talking about, but he has a great civility about him. Perhaps I better investigate this thing.'
David Mamet
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I'm afraid of only two things: being lazy and being cowardly.
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