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You can't rely on the acting to tell the story.
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
Rely
Acting
Story
Tell
Stories
More quotes by David Mamet
We must have a pie. Stress cannot exist in the presence of a pie.
David Mamet
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.
David Mamet
The work of the director is the work of constructing the shot list from the script.
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
If You can't tell it to me in one sentence, they can't put it in TV Guide.
David Mamet
When we fear things I think that we wish for them ... every fear hides a wish
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
The greater the intellect, the more ease in its misdirection.
David Mamet
You know, young actors say all the time, 'Should I use my own life experience?' And my response is, 'What choice do you have?'
David Mamet
Everybody makes their own fun. If you don't make it yourself, it isn't fun. It's entertainment.
David Mamet
Liberalism is a religion. Its tenets cannot be proved, its capacity for waste and destruction demonstrated. But it affords a feeling of spiritual rectitude at little or no cost.
David Mamet
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
Opportunity may knock, but it seldom nags.
David Mamet
I'm afraid of only two things: being lazy and being cowardly.
David Mamet
Before you can steal fire from the Gods you gotta be able to get coffee for the director.
David Mamet
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
They say the definition of ambivalence is watching your mother-in-law drive over a cliff in your new Cadillac.
David Mamet
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.
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
Blasphemy and prayer are one. Both assert the existence of a superior power. The first, however, with conviction.
David Mamet
