David Mamet Quotes - Page 8

I pray you indulge me for a space, for I am going to set out on a speech which may have some duration, but whose theme may be gleaned from its opening phrase: how dare you.

You can't rely on the acting to tell the story.

I won't ever do e-mail.

The images in a dream are vastly varied and magnificently interesting.

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.

All of us. All of us. We're doomed.

It is to a dramatist, which is to say, to an unfrocked psychoanalyst, stunning that that which has sustained the Left in my generation, its avatar, its prime issue, has been abortion. For, whether or not it is regarded as a woman's right, an unfortunate necessity, or murder, which is to say, irrespective of differing and legitimate political views, to enshrine it as the most important test of the Liberal, is, mythologically, an assertion to the ultimate right of a postreligious Paganism.

Here is a sovereign talisman against regret: never do that which might engender it.

In practice we, in the world, must do business with each other.

It's hard for a Jew of my generation, an American Jew, who is philo-Zionistic, not to romanticize Israel.

What we're trying to do is find two or more shots the juxtaposition of which will give us the idea.

War is tragedy. The great war stories are tragedies. It's the failure of diplomacy. 'War and Peace,' 'A Farewell to Arms,' 'For Whom the Bell Tolls.' Those are some of the greatest tragedies.

How can I be secure? Through amassing wealth beyond all measure? No. And what's beyond measure? That's a sickness. That's a trap. There is no measure. Only greed.

I'm responding to the will of the people.

Blasphemy and prayer are one. Both assert the existence of a superior power. The first, however, with conviction.

You don't know what life is. You know nothing.

The essence of jiu-jitsu is philosophy.

The product of the artist has become less important than the fact of the artist. We wish to absorb this person. We wish to devour someone who has experienced the tragic. In our society this person is much more important than anything he might create.

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.

Movies were never an art form, they were entertainment. It just evolved into an art form from there, and it's still evolving in different ways.

Each culture has its own form of staged combat, evolved from its particular method of street fighting and cleaned up for presentation as a spectacle, e.g. savate, Cornish wrestling, karate, kung-fu.

I've been alienating my public since I was 20 years old.

A stage play is basically a form of uber-schizophrenia. You split yourself into two minds - one being the protagonist and the other being the antagonist. The playwright also splits himself into two other minds: the mind of the writer and the mind of the audience.

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.'

A liberal pretending to be a conservative? That's like a straight person pretending to be gay to get greater acceptance.