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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
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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Interesting
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Play
Truthful
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More quotes by David Mamet

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The correct unit of study is not the play it is the scene.
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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?
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Here's what happens in a play. You get involved in a situation where something is unbalanced. If nothing's unbalanced, there's no reason to have a play. If Hamlet comes home from school, and his dad's not dead and asks him if he's had a good time, it's boring. But if something's unbalanced, it must be returned to order.
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It's upsetting to be a man in our society.
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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.
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In practice we, in the world, must do business with each other.
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Always tell the truth - it's the easiest thing to remember.
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When I started out I was a failed actor.
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I understand that computers, which I once believed to be but a hermaphrodite typewriter-cum-filing cabinet, offer the cyber literate increased ability to communicate. I do not think this is altogether a bad thing, however it may appear on the surface.
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Based on a true story is a come-on, the aesthetic equivalent of no loan request refused. For, at best, the creator has fashioned a film based on his understanding of, interpretation of, and reduction of the report of an actual occurrence.
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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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Hitchcock denigrated American films, saying they were all 'pictures of people talking' - as, indeed, most of them are.
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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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I hate vacations. There's nothing to do.
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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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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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I tend to write a lot, which I think is the secret to being prolific.
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The honest man might observe... that no one gets something for nothing that politicians go in poor and go out rich that the Government screws up everything it touches and that the Will to Believe is best confined to the Religious Venue, as to practice it elsewhere is just too damned expensive.
David Mamet
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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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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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