David Mamet Quotes

Every scene should be able to answer three questions: "Who wants what from whom? What happens if they don't get it? Why now?"

Forget narrative, backstory, characterisation, exposition, all of that. Just make the audience want to know what happens next.

When the three branches of government have failed to represent the citizenry and the mass of the media has failed to represent the citizenry, then the citizenry better represent the citizenry.

Opportunity may knock, but it seldom nags.

People may or may not say what they mean... but they always say something designed to get what they want.

We all die in the end, but there's no reason to die in the middle.

It is the writer’s job to make the play interesting. It is the actor’s job to make the performance truthful.

Worry is interest paid in advance on a debt that never comes due.

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.

A good writer gets better only by learning to cut, to remove the ornamental, the descriptive, the narrative, and especially the deeply felt and meaningful. What remains? The story remains.

One person may need (or want) more leisure, another more work; one more adventure, another more security, and so on. It is this diversity that makes a country, indeed a state, a city, a church, or a family, healthy. 'One-size-fits-all,' and that size determined by the State has a name, and that name is 'slavery.'

The audience requires not information but drama.

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.

Anyone ever lost in the wild knows that nature wants you dead.

The study of acting consists in the main of getting out of one’s own way, and in learning to deal with uncertainty and being comfortable being uncomfortable.

Having spent too many years in show business, the one thing I see that succeeds is persistence. It's the person who just ain't gonna go home. I decided early on that I wasn't going to go home. This is what I'll be doing until they put me in jail or in a coffin.

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.

The conscious mind is going to suggest the obvious, the cliché, because these things have offered the security of having succeeded in the past.

Don't write stage directions. If it is not apparent what the character is trying to accomplish by saying the line, tell us how the character said it or whether or not she moved to the couch isn't going to aid the case.

Every fear hides a wish.

Welcome to Chicago. This town stinks like a whorehouse at low tide.

The greater the intellect, the more ease in its misdirection.

The subject of drama is The Lie. At the end of the drama THE TRUTH -- which has been overlooked, disregarded, scorned, and denied -- prevails. And that is how we know the Drama is done.

There's no such thing as talent; you just have to work hard enough.

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.