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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
Opportunity
May
Nags
Knock
Seldom

More quotes by 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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I don't really have a social life.
David Mamet
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You wanna know how to get Capone? They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That's the Chicago way! And that's how you get Capone.
David Mamet
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The main question in drama, the way I was taught, is always, 'What does the protagonist want?' That's what drama is. It comes down to that. It's not about theme, it's not about ideas, it's not about setting, but what the protagonist wants.
David Mamet
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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.
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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The purpose of technique is to free the unconscious. If you follow the rules ploddingly, they will allow your unconscious to be free.
David Mamet
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In practice we, in the world, must do business with each other.
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.
David Mamet
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The great movie can be as free of being a record of the progress of the protagonist as is a dream.
David Mamet
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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?
David Mamet
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There is a profound and ineradicable taint of antisemitism in the British.
David Mamet
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A good film script should be able to do completely without dialogue.
David Mamet
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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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I've always been fascinated by the picaresque.
David Mamet
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Every reiteration of the idea that nothing matters debases the human spirit.
David Mamet
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The terror and beauty of the dream come from the connection of previously unrelated mundanities of life.
David Mamet
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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.
David Mamet
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Mixed martial arts was invented by Brazilians, whose families had been trained by the Japanese. Those Brazilians came to the U.S., where their invention was bought out, gussied up and presented to the world, which found it good.
David Mamet
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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.
David Mamet