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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
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David Mamet
Age: 76
Born: 1947
Born: November 30
Actor
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Film Director
Film Producer
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Screenwriter
Television Producer
Theatrical Director
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Chicago
Illinois
David Alen Mamet
David Alan Mamet
Way
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More quotes by 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
Here is a sovereign talisman against regret: never do that which might engender it.
David Mamet
Fun is what you do for yourself. If somebody else does it, it's entertainment.
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
We live in oppressive times. We have, as a nation, become our own thought police but instead of calling the process by which we limit our expression of dissent and wonder ‘censorship,’ we call it ‘concern for commercial viability.
David Mamet
I understand that computers, which I once believed to be but a hermaphrodite typewriter-cum-filing cabinet, offer the cyber literate increased ability to communicate. I do not think this is altogether a bad thing, however it may appear on the surface.
David Mamet
A dramatic experience concerned with the mundane may inform but it cannot release and one concerned essentially with the aesthetic politics of its creators may divert or anger, but it cannot enlighten.
David Mamet
Film is a collaborative business: bend over.
David Mamet
Roll back the clock, and every possession of every great country started with a crime.
David Mamet
American football seems to resemble soccer in that one scores by putting the ball through the opponent's goal but football, truly is about land. The Settlers want to move the line of scrimmage Westward, the Native Americans want to move it East.
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
Let the cut tell the story. Otherwise you have not got dramatic action, you've got narration.
David Mamet
To find beauty in the sad, hope in the midst of loss, and dignity in failure is great poetic art.
David Mamet
Welcome to Chicago. This town stinks like a whorehouse at low tide.
David Mamet
Hitchcock denigrated American films, saying they were all 'pictures of people talking' - as, indeed, most of them are.
David Mamet
Before you can steal fire from the Gods you gotta be able to get coffee for the director.
David Mamet
All of us. All of us. We're doomed.
David Mamet
The Founders recognized that Government is quite literally a necessary evil, that there must be opposition, between its various branches, and between political parties, for these are the only ways to temper the individual's greed for power and the electorates' desires for peace by submission to coercion or blandishment.
David Mamet
Every reiteration of the idea that nothing matters debases the human spirit.
David Mamet
When you come into the theatre, you have to be willing to say, 'We're all here to undergo a communion, to find out what the hell is going on in this world.' If you're not willing to say that, what you get is entertainment instead of art, and poor entertainment at that.
David Mamet