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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: 76
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
Assured
Scene
Rest
Audience
Actors
Read
Back
Bore
Going
Bores

More quotes by David Mamet

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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.
David Mamet
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I don't really have a social life.
David Mamet
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Everybody makes their own fun. If you don't make it yourself, it isn't fun. It's entertainment.
David Mamet
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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.
David Mamet
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Hitchcock denigrated American films, saying they were all 'pictures of people talking' - as, indeed, most of them are.
David Mamet
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Make the audience wonder what's going on by putting them in the same position as the protagonist.
David Mamet
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Every reiteration of the idea that nothing matters debases the human spirit.
David Mamet
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They have a desire to put on plays and to fulfill that traditional role of a theater in a community: to be the place where people go to hear the truth.
David Mamet
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They say the definition of ambivalence is watching your mother-in-law drive over a cliff in your new Cadillac.
David Mamet
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Our job, as writers is to do our jobs.
David Mamet
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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
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Any time two characters are talking about a third, the scene is a crock of s***.
David Mamet
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Encounter: Doubt, Shame, Humiliation. It will finally be worth it. Acting is more about courage than anything else.
David Mamet
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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.
David Mamet
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The subject of drama is The Lie. At the end of the drama THE TRUTH -- which has been overlooked, disregarded, scorned, and denied -- prevails. And that is how we know the Drama is done.
David Mamet
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When I started out I was a failed actor.
David Mamet
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Policemen so cherish their status as keepers of the peace and protectors of the public that they have occasionally been known to beat to death those citizens or groups who question that status.
David Mamet
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Invent nothing, deny nothing, speak up, stand up, stay out of school.
David Mamet
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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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Before you can steal fire from the Gods you gotta be able to get coffee for the director.
David Mamet