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People ask me, 'What do you do?' And I tell them I'm a writer, but always with the silent reservation, 'I am, of course, not really a writer. Hemingway was a writer.'

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
Really
Hemingway
Always
Reservations
People
Silent
Writer
Courses
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Asks
Tell
Reservation

More quotes by David Mamet

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Encounter: Doubt, Shame, Humiliation. It will finally be worth it. Acting is more about courage than anything else.
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It is not the constitutional prerogative of the Government to determine needs.
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I'm greedy and ambitious like everybody else.
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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).
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I love all insider memoirs. It doesn't matter whether it's truck-drivers or doctors. I think everybody likes to go backstage, find out what people think and what they talk about and what specialised job they have.
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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.
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Every fear hides a wish.
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To find beauty in the sad, hope in the midst of loss, and dignity in failure is great poetic art.
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A novel it's different. It's kind of exhilarating not to have to cut to the bone constantly. Oh, well I can go over here for a moment. I can say what I think the guy was thinking or what the day looked like or what the bird was doing. If you do that as a playwright, you're dead.
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I've always been fascinated by the picaresque.
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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.
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We all hope. It's what keeps us alive.
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We must have a pie. Stress cannot exist in the presence of a pie.
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Obama is a tyrant the same way FDR was a tyrant. He has a view of presidential power that states: the government is in control of the country, and the president is in charge of the government. He's taken an imperial view of the presidency.
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Roll back the clock, and every possession of every great country started with a crime.
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It is the writer’s job to make the play interesting. It is the actor’s job to make the performance truthful.
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All of us. All of us. We're doomed.
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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.
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Let the cut tell the story. Otherwise you have not got dramatic action, you've got narration.
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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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