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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.

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
School
Suspect
Suspects
Schools
Useless
Drama
Experience
Found
Film

More quotes by David Mamet

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Every fear hides a wish.
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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.
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I didn't knowingly meet a conservative until, to my shame, I was 60 years old and sat down and said, 'Wow, I don't understand what this guy's talking about, but he has a great civility about him. Perhaps I better investigate this thing.'
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The work of the director is the work of constructing the shot list from the script.
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Every scene should be able to answer three questions: Who wants what from whom? What happens if they don't get it? Why now?
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People ask me, 'What do you do?' And I tell them I'm a writer, but always with the silent reservation, 'I am, of course, not really a writer. Hemingway was a writer.'
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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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Life in the movie business is like the beginning of a new love affair: it's full of surprises, and you're constantly getting f***ed.
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I know very well what it is to be out of work and to be cheated by employers and I know what it is to be an employer.
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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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All of us. All of us. We're doomed.
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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.
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I always thought the real violence in Hollywood isn't what's on the screen. It's what you have to do to raise the money.
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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.
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My alma mater is the Chicago Public Library.
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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 secret knowledge is there's nobody home but us chickens. The Constitution was written by a bunch of regular guys who tried to get together and thrash out a contract under which they could get together that would keep people together.
David Mamet
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Let the cut tell the story. Otherwise you have not got dramatic action, you've got narration.
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The greater the intellect, the more ease in its misdirection.
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The most charming of theories holds that someone other than Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare's plays -- that he was of too low a state, and of insufficient education. But where in the wide history of the world do we find art created by the excessively wealthy, powerful, or educated?
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