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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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David Mamet
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: November 30
Actor
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Film Director
Film Producer
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Playwright
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Screenwriter
Television Producer
Theatrical Director
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Chicago
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David Alen Mamet
David Alan Mamet
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More quotes by David Mamet
A good film script should be able to do completely without dialogue.
David Mamet
I tend to write a lot, which I think is the secret to being prolific.
David Mamet
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
Every reiteration of the idea that nothing matters debases the human spirit.
David Mamet
Here is a sovereign talisman against regret: never do that which might engender it.
David Mamet
If You can't tell it to me in one sentence, they can't put it in TV Guide.
David Mamet
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.
David Mamet
We live in oppressive times. We have, as a nation, become our own thought police but instead of calling the process by which we limit our expression of dissent and wonder ‘censorship,’ we call it ‘concern for commercial viability.
David Mamet
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
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
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
For it is written that just as it is forbidden to partake of the forbidden, it is forbidden not to partake of the permitted.
David Mamet
I'm greedy and ambitious like everybody else.
David Mamet
They say the definition of ambivalence is watching your mother-in-law drive over a cliff in your new Cadillac.
David Mamet
If you find that a point cannot be made without narration, it is virtually certain that the point is unimportant to the story (which is to say, to the audience).
David Mamet
I'm not the guy to ask about politics. I'm a gag writer.
David Mamet
Like Lincoln said: If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong, and I feel the same way about the leftist dismantling of the West. If that's not wrong, then nothing is wrong.
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
It is not the constitutional prerogative of the Government to determine needs.
David Mamet
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
