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If you find that a point cannot be made without narration, it is virtually certain that the point is unimportant to the story (which is to say, to the audience).
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
Made
Audience
Story
Point
Cannot
Stories
Certain
Narration
Find
Unimportant
Without
Virtually
More quotes by David Mamet
Movies were never an art form, they were entertainment. It just evolved into an art form from there, and it's still evolving in different ways.
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Put. That coffee. Down. Coffee's for closers only.
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My alma mater is the Chicago Public Library.
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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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I don't have any experience with film schools. I suspect that they're useless, because I've had experience with drama schools, and have found them to be useless.
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A dramatic experience concerned with the mundane may inform but it cannot release and one concerned essentially with the aesthetic politics of its creators may divert or anger, but it cannot enlighten.
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Always tell the truth - it's the easiest thing to remember.
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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.
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Luck, if there is such a thing, is either going to favor everyone equally or going to exhibit a preference for the prepared.
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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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Any time two characters are talking about a third, the scene is a crock of s***.
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My tendency as an actor was to correct people, was to say, 'What if we tried it this way, what about if we tried that way?' That's terrible habit for an actor, but that's a good habit for director. So I became a director.
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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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Everybody makes their own fun. If you don't make it yourself, it isn't fun. It's entertainment.
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Old age and treachery will always beat youth and exuberance.
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I'm afraid of only two things: being lazy and being cowardly.
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I love working on a typewriter - the rhythm, the sound it's like playing the piano, which I do, too.
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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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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 great movie can be as free of being a record of the progress of the protagonist as is a dream.
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