David Mamet Quotes - Page 3

The job of the artist, is to say, wait a second, everything that we have thought is wrong. Let's re-examine it.

You know, I once read an interesting book which said that, uh, most people lost in the wilds, they, they die of shame. Yeah, see, they die of shame. 'What did I do wrong? How could I have gotten myself into this?' And so they sit there and they... die. Because they didn't do the one thing that would save their lives. Thinking.

Listen, here's the thing about an English degree - if you sat somebody down and asked them to make a list of the writers they admire over the last hundred years, see how many of them got a degree in English.

It's only words... unless they're true.

Roll back the clock, and every possession of every great country started with a crime.

My greatest fear is that the audience will beat me to the punch line.

They say the definition of ambivalence is watching your mother-in-law drive over a cliff in your new Cadillac.

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.

I hate vacations. There's nothing to do.

I've always been fascinated by the picaresque.

There is no such thing as character other than the habitual action, as Mr. Aristotle told us two thousand years ago.

I look back on my liberal political beliefs with a sort of wonder - as another exercise in self-involvement - rewarding myself for some superiority I could not logically describe.

The audience will teach you how to act and the audience will teach you how to write and to direct. The classroom will teach you how to obey, and obedience in the theatre will get you nowhere. It’s a soothing falsity.

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.

I've always been more comfortable sinking while clutching a good theory than swimming with an ugly fact.

All rhetorical questions are accusations.

When we leave the play saying how spectacular the sets or costumes were, or how interesting the ideas, it means we had a bad time.

The liberals in my neighbourhood wouldn't give away Brentwood to the Palestinians, but they want to give away Tel Aviv.

All fears are one fear. Just the fear of death. And we accept it, then we are at peace.

People only speak to get something.

Every reiteration of the idea that nothing matters debases the human spirit.

They have a desire to put on plays and to fulfill that traditional role of a theater in a community: to be the place where people go to hear the truth.

President Obama seems to understand the Constitution as a 'set of suggestions.'

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.

People only speak to get something. If I say, Let me tell you a few things about myself, already your defenses go up; you go, Look, I wonder what he wants from me, because no one ever speaks except to obtain an objective. That's the only reason anyone ever opens their mouth, onstage or offstage. They may use a language that seems revealing, but if so, it's just coincidence, because what they're trying to do is accomplish an objective.