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Opportunity may knock, but it seldom nags.

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
Nags
Knock
Seldom
Opportunity
May

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What I value most in my friends is loyalty.
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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?
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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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Make the audience wonder what's going on by putting them in the same position as the protagonist.
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My alma mater is the Chicago Public Library.
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I'm afraid of only two things: being lazy and being cowardly.
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Let the cut tell the story. Otherwise you have not got dramatic action, you've got narration.
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Being among my people is a delight. We Jews live among ourselves. I love it.
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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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If you're writing an opinion piece, it's your job to write your opinion. If, on the other hand, you wrote a novel, as Virginia Woolf tells us, it would be inappropriate if you let your novel be influenced by your political opinions.
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We all hope. It's what keeps us alive.
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I grew up in a tough neighborhood and we used to say you can get further with a kind word and a gun than just a kind word.
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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.
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I love all insider memoirs. It doesn't matter whether it's truck-drivers or doctors. I think everybody likes to go backstage, find out what people think and what they talk about and what specialised job they have.
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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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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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All of us. All of us. We're doomed.
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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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I love Superman. I'm a big fan of anyone who can make his living in his underwear.
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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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