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They say the definition of ambivalence is watching your mother-in-law drive over a cliff in your new Cadillac.
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
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Chicago
Illinois
David Alen Mamet
David Alan Mamet
Law
Cadillacs
Mother
Ambivalence
Cliff
Cliffs
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Drive
Watching
Cadillac
More quotes by David Mamet
The individual is not only best qualified to provide his own personal defense, he is the only one qualified to do so: and his right to do so is guaranteed by the Constitution.
David Mamet
Everybody makes their own fun. If you don't make it yourself, it isn't fun. It's entertainment.
David Mamet
Welcome to Chicago. This town stinks like a whorehouse at low tide.
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
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
Luck, if there is such a thing, is either going to favor everyone equally or going to exhibit a preference for the prepared.
David Mamet
I've been alienating my public since I was 20 years old.
David Mamet
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.
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
The mind is a mill which can incessant turn, 'til its mere operation focus the stress inward and the stones grind themselves to dust.
David Mamet
Storytelling is like sex. We all do it naturally. Some of us are better at it than others.
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
In practice we, in the world, must do business with each other.
David Mamet
Film is a collaborative business: bend over.
David Mamet
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?
David Mamet
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.
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
The work of the director is the work of constructing the shot list from the script.
David Mamet
Every scene should be able to answer three questions: Who wants what from whom? What happens if they don't get it? Why now?
David Mamet
Blasphemy and prayer are one. Both assert the existence of a superior power. The first, however, with conviction.
David Mamet
