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We Americans have always considered Hollywood, at best, a sinkhole of depraved venality. And, of course, it is. It is not a protective monastery of aesthetic truth. It is a place where everything is incredibly expensive.

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
Place
Aesthetic
Truth
Incredibly
Best
Expensive
Everything
Considered
Venality
Always
Hollywood
Monastery
Americans
Monasteries
Courses
Depraved
Course
Protective

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When we fear things I think that we wish for them ... every fear hides a wish
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IF YOU PRETEND THE CHARACTERS CANT SPEAK, AND WRITE A SILENT MOVIE, YOU WILL BE WRITING GREAT DRAMA.
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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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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.
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Invent nothing, deny nothing, speak up, stand up, stay out of school.
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They say the definition of ambivalence is watching your mother-in-law drive over a cliff in your new Cadillac.
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We all hope. It's what keeps us alive.
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What we're trying to do is find two or more shots the juxtaposition of which will give us the idea.
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The avant-garde is to the left what jingoism is to the right. Both are a refuge in nonsense.
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The Founders recognized that Government is quite literally a necessary evil, that there must be opposition, between its various branches, and between political parties, for these are the only ways to temper the individual's greed for power and the electorates' desires for peace by submission to coercion or blandishment.
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