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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
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Film Director
Film Producer
Novelist
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Poet
Screenwriter
Television Producer
Theatrical Director
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Chicago
Illinois
David Alen Mamet
David Alan Mamet
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More quotes by David Mamet
I'm entitled to my political opinions, and I get to vote because I'm an American.
David Mamet
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
Make the audience wonder what's going on by putting them in the same position as the protagonist.
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I've been alienating my public since I was 20 years old.
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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.
David Mamet
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
Encounter: Doubt, Shame, Humiliation. It will finally be worth it. Acting is more about courage than anything else.
David Mamet
In my family, in the days prior to television, we liked to while away the evenings by making ourselves miserable, solely based on our ability to speak the language viciously.
David Mamet
When you come into the theatre, you have to be willing to say, 'We're all here to undergo a communion, to find out what the hell is going on in this world.' If you're not willing to say that, what you get is entertainment instead of art, and poor entertainment at that.
David Mamet
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.
David Mamet
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.
David Mamet
Everybody makes their own fun. If you don't make it yourself, it isn't fun. It's entertainment.
David Mamet
They say the definition of ambivalence is watching your mother-in-law drive over a cliff in your new Cadillac.
David Mamet
A dramatic experience concerned with the mundane may inform but it cannot release and one concerned essentially with the aesthetic politics of its creators may divert or anger, but it cannot enlighten.
David Mamet
Always do things the least interesting way, the most blunt way, and you make a better movie. This is my experience.
David Mamet
Show business is and has always been a depraved carnival.
David Mamet
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.
David Mamet
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
American football seems to resemble soccer in that one scores by putting the ball through the opponent's goal but football, truly is about land. The Settlers want to move the line of scrimmage Westward, the Native Americans want to move it East.
David Mamet
I was fortunate enough to have a rambling youth.
David Mamet
