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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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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
People
Traditional
Theater
Role
Hear
Community
Desire
Fulfill
Place
Plays
Truth
Theatre

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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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Every fear hides a wish.
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Don't write stage directions. If it is not apparent what the character is trying to accomplish by saying the line, tell us how the character said it or whether or not she moved to the couch isn't going to aid the case.
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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.
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There's nothing in the world more silent than the telephone the morning after everybody pans your play. It won't ring from room service your mother won't be calling you. If the phone has not rung by 8 in the morning, you're dead.
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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.
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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.
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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're all put to the test... but it never comes in the form or at the point we would prefer, does it?
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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.
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You know, I once read an interesting book which said that, uh, most people lost in the wilds, they, they die of shame. Yeah, see, they die of shame. 'What did I do wrong? How could I have gotten myself into this?' And so they sit there and they... die. Because they didn't do the one thing that would save their lives. Thinking.
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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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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.
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You get rich through luck. You get rich through crime. You get rich through fulfilling the needs of another. You can be as greedy as you like. If you can’t do one of those three things, you ain’t going to get any money.
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You know, young actors say all the time, 'Should I use my own life experience?' And my response is, 'What choice do you have?'
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The audience requires not information but drama.
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What I value most in my friends is loyalty.
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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.
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Any time two characters are talking about a third, the scene is a crock of s***.
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Opportunity may knock, but it seldom nags.
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