Quote

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

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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
World
Room
Telephones
Rooms
Ring
Dead
Phone
Everybody
Rings
Morning
Phones
Mother
Calling
Pans
Nothing
Service
Rung
Play
Silent
Telephone

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A man stands alone at the plate. This is the time for what? For individual achievement. There he stands alone. But in the field, what? Part of a team.
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Being a writer in Hollywood is like going to Hitler's Eagle Nest with a great idea for a bar mitzvah.
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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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If you're writing an opinion piece, it's your job to write your opinion. If, on the other hand, you wrote a novel, as Virginia Woolf tells us, it would be inappropriate if you let your novel be influenced by your political opinions.
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I won't ever do e-mail.
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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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Do not internalize the industrial model. You are not one of the myriad interchangeable pieces, but a unique human being, and if you've got something to say, say it, and think well of yourself while you're learning to say it better.
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Here is a sovereign talisman against regret: never do that which might engender it.
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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?
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Every reiteration of the idea that nothing matters debases the human spirit.
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I'm greedy and ambitious like everybody else.
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If the scene bores you when you read it, rest assured it WILL bore the actors, and will then bore the audience, and we're all going to be back in the breadline.
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The greater the intellect, the more ease in its misdirection.
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Train yourself for a profession that does not exist.
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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.'
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Hitchcock denigrated American films, saying they were all 'pictures of people talking' - as, indeed, most of them are.
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Based on a true story is a come-on, the aesthetic equivalent of no loan request refused. For, at best, the creator has fashioned a film based on his understanding of, interpretation of, and reduction of the report of an actual occurrence.
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Every fear hides a wish.
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