Quote

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?

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
Writer
Unwittingly
Joy
Diners
Hell
Displayed
Wonder
Wondering
Restaurant
Observed
Scowling
Restaurants
Unobserved
Sorrow
Naively

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Movies were never an art form, they were entertainment. It just evolved into an art form from there, and it's still evolving in different ways.
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I hate vacations. There's nothing to do.
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We must have a pie. Stress cannot exist in the presence of a pie.
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Train yourself for a profession that does not exist.
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I like Bach. I like Randy Newman.
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Our job, as writers is to do our jobs.
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For it is written that just as it is forbidden to partake of the forbidden, it is forbidden not to partake of the permitted.
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To find beauty in the sad, hope in the midst of loss, and dignity in failure is great poetic art.
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Old age and treachery will always beat youth and exuberance.
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Storytelling is like sex. We all do it naturally. Some of us are better at it than others.
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Liberalism is a religion. Its tenets cannot be proved, its capacity for waste and destruction demonstrated. But it affords a feeling of spiritual rectitude at little or no cost.
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People only speak to get something.
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A novel it's different. It's kind of exhilarating not to have to cut to the bone constantly. Oh, well I can go over here for a moment. I can say what I think the guy was thinking or what the day looked like or what the bird was doing. If you do that as a playwright, you're dead.
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There is a profound and ineradicable taint of antisemitism in the British.
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A play is basically a long, formalistic polemic. You can write it without the poetry, and if you do, you may have a pretty good play. We know this because we see plays in translation. Not many people speak Norwegian or Danish or whatever guys like Ibsen spoke, or Russian - yet we understand Chekhov and the others.
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