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Film is a collaborative business: bend over.

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
Bend
Business
Film
Collaborative

More quotes by David Mamet

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My dad was a labour lawyer, and the ideas that I grew up with - bad management, bad capitalism, robber barons - when I applied this to my own life, I saw that we are all on both sides of the coin.
David Mamet
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When the three branches of government have failed to represent the citizenry and the mass of the media has failed to represent the citizenry, then the citizenry better represent the citizenry.
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
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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.
David Mamet
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We're all put to the test... but it never comes in the form or at the point we would prefer, does it?
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.
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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Hitchcock denigrated American films, saying they were all 'pictures of people talking' - as, indeed, most of them are.
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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The study of acting consists in the main of getting out of one’s own way, and in learning to deal with uncertainty and being comfortable being uncomfortable.
David Mamet
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Based on a true story is a come-on, the aesthetic equivalent of no loan request refused. For, at best, the creator has fashioned a film based on his understanding of, interpretation of, and reduction of the report of an actual occurrence.
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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One can read all one wants, and spend eternities in front of a blackboard with a tutor, but one is not going to learn to swim until one gets in the water.
David Mamet
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It is the writer’s job to make the play interesting. It is the actor’s job to make the performance truthful.
David Mamet
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We recipients of the boon of liberty have always been ready, when faced with discomfort, to discard any and all first principles of liberty, and, further, to indict those who do not freely join with us in happily arrogating those principles.
David Mamet
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Every reiteration of the idea that nothing matters debases the human spirit.
David Mamet
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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.
David Mamet
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American football seems to resemble soccer in that one scores by putting the ball through the opponent's goal but football, truly is about land. The Settlers want to move the line of scrimmage Westward, the Native Americans want to move it East.
David Mamet
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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.
David Mamet
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When you come into the theatre, you have to be willing to say, 'We're all here to undergo a communion, to find out what the hell is going on in this world.' If you're not willing to say that, what you get is entertainment instead of art, and poor entertainment at that.
David Mamet