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If the scene bores you when you read it, rest assured it WILL bore the actors, and will then bore the audience, and we're all going to be back in the breadline.

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
Scene
Rest
Audience
Actors
Read
Back
Bore
Going
Bores
Assured

More quotes by David Mamet

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I'm not the guy to ask about politics. I'm a gag writer.
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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.
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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?
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Do not internalize the industrial model. You are not one of the myriad interchangeable pieces, but a unique human being, and if you've got something to say, say it, and think well of yourself while you're learning to say it better.
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Characters on stage, like people in what we refer to as real life, do not speak to reveal themselves. They do not speak to conceal themselves. They speak to get whatever it is that they want. It is the only reason they speak.
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Roll back the clock, and every possession of every great country started with a crime.
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I love working on a typewriter - the rhythm, the sound it's like playing the piano, which I do, too.
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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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My idea of perfect happiness is a healthy family, peace between nations, and all the critics die.
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Blasphemy and prayer are one. Both assert the existence of a superior power. The first, however, with conviction.
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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.
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The work of the director is the work of constructing the shot list from the script.
David Mamet
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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.
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I've been alienating my public since I was 20 years old.
David Mamet
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My alma mater is the Chicago Public Library.
David Mamet
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Here is a sovereign talisman against regret: never do that which might engender it.
David Mamet
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I'm greedy and ambitious like everybody else.
David Mamet
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Always tell the truth - it's the easiest thing to remember.
David Mamet
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I pray you indulge me for a space, for I am going to set out on a speech which may have some duration, but whose theme may be gleaned from its opening phrase: how dare you.
David Mamet
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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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