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To find beauty in the sad, hope in the midst of loss, and dignity in failure is great poetic art.

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
Failure
Loss
Beauty
Hope
Art
Find
Poetic
Great
Midst
Dignity

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Any time two characters are talking about a third, the scene is a crock of s***.
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It's hard for a Jew of my generation, an American Jew, who is philo-Zionistic, not to romanticize Israel.
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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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Blasphemy and prayer are one. Both assert the existence of a superior power. The first, however, with conviction.
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Being among my people is a delight. We Jews live among ourselves. I love it.
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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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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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Here is a sovereign talisman against regret: never do that which might engender it.
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I've always been fascinated by the picaresque.
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Characters on stage, like people in what we refer to as real life, do not speak to reveal themselves. They do not speak to conceal themselves. They speak to get whatever it is that they want. It is the only reason they speak.
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It is not the constitutional prerogative of the Government to determine needs.
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The audience requires not information but drama.
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Before you can steal fire from the Gods you gotta be able to get coffee for the director.
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In my family, in the days prior to television, we liked to while away the evenings by making ourselves miserable, solely based on our ability to speak the language viciously.
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The main question in drama, the way I was taught, is always, 'What does the protagonist want?' That's what drama is. It comes down to that. It's not about theme, it's not about ideas, it's not about setting, but what the protagonist wants.
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The Israelis would like to live in peace within their borders the Arabs would like to kill them all.
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I hate vacations. There's nothing to do.
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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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The purpose of technique is to free the unconscious. If you follow the rules ploddingly, they will allow your unconscious to be free.
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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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