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Let the cut tell the story. Otherwise you have not got dramatic action, you've got narration.
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
Tell
Stories
Narration
Dramatic
Otherwise
Cutting
Story
Action
More quotes by David Mamet
Like Lincoln said: If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong, and I feel the same way about the leftist dismantling of the West. If that's not wrong, then nothing is wrong.
David Mamet
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
I grew up in a tough neighborhood and we used to say you can get further with a kind word and a gun than just a kind word.
David Mamet
Fun is what you do for yourself. If somebody else does it, it's entertainment.
David Mamet
Being among my people is a delight. We Jews live among ourselves. I love it.
David Mamet
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
The purpose of technique is to free the unconscious. If you follow the rules ploddingly, they will allow your unconscious to be free.
David Mamet
If, indeed, a firearm were more dangerous to its possessors than to potential aggressors, would it not make sense for the government to arm all criminals, and let them accidentally shoot themselves? Is this absurd? Yes, and yet the government, of course, is arming criminals.
David Mamet
Blasphemy and prayer are one. Both assert the existence of a superior power. The first, however, with conviction.
David Mamet
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
Many players will not improve because they cannot bear self-knowledge.
David Mamet
Any time two characters are talking about a third, the scene is a crock of s***.
David Mamet
As you all know first prize is a Cadillac El Dorado. Anyone wanna see second prize? Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you're fired.
David Mamet
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
A good film script should be able to do completely without dialogue.
David Mamet
Before you can steal fire from the Gods you gotta be able to get coffee for the director.
David Mamet
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.
David Mamet
In practice we, in the world, must do business with each other.
David Mamet
In a restaurant one is both observed and unobserved. Joy and sorrow can be displayed and observed unwittingly, the writer scowling naively and the diners wondering, What the hell is he doing?
David Mamet
They say the definition of ambivalence is watching your mother-in-law drive over a cliff in your new Cadillac.
David Mamet
