Top 200 David Mamet Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “My definition of a ‘friend’ is, coming from Chicago, someone who says, ‘Yeah, sure. You know what? Let’s talk about what we can talk about. Let’s help each other out. Your politics are none of my business.’”

— David Mamet

102. “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.”

— David Mamet

103. “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.”

— David Mamet

104. “Like Lincoln said: “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong,” and I feel the same way about the leftist dismantling of the West. If that’s not wrong, then nothing is wrong.”

— David Mamet

105. “I’m responding to the will of the people.”

— David Mamet

106. “The work of the director is the work of constructing the shot list from the script.”

— David Mamet

107. “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.”

— David Mamet

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

— David Mamet

109. “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.”

— David Mamet

110. “I’ve always been fascinated by the picaresque.”

— David Mamet

111. “I didn’t knowingly meet a conservative until, to my shame, I was 60 years old and sat down and said, ‘Wow, I don’t understand what this guy’s talking about, but he has a great civility about him. Perhaps I better investigate this thing.’”

— David Mamet

112. “The pain of losing is diverting. So is the thrill of winning. Winning, however, is lonelier, as those you’ve won money from are not likely to commiserate with you. Winning takes getting used to.”

— David Mamet

113. “Luck, if there is such a thing, is either going to favor everyone equally or going to exhibit a preference for the prepared.”

— David Mamet

114. “It is the objective of the protagonist that keeps us in our seats.”

— David Mamet

115. “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.”

— David Mamet

116. “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.”

— David Mamet

117. “The most charming of theories holds that someone other than Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare’s plays – that he was of too low a state, and of insufficient education. But where in the wide history of the world do we find art created by the excessively wealthy, powerful, or educated?”

— David Mamet

118. “We live in oppressive times. We have, as a nation, become our own thought police; but instead of calling the process by which we limit our expression of dissent and wonder ‘censorship,’ we call it ’concern for commercial viability.”

— David Mamet

119. “It’s hard to write a good play because it’s hard to structure a plot. If you can think of it off the top of your head, so can the audience.”

— David Mamet

120. “Being a writer in Hollywood is like going to Hitler’s Eagle Nest with a great idea for a bar mitzvah.”

— David Mamet

121. “You can’t rely on the acting to tell the story.”

— David Mamet

122. “I tend to write a lot, which I think is the secret to being prolific.”

— David Mamet

123. “Show business is and has always been a depraved carnival.”

— David Mamet

124. “I was fortunate enough to have a rambling youth.”

— David Mamet

125. “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.”

— David Mamet

126. “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.”

— David Mamet

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

— David Mamet

128. “Any claim to actual identification as a drama must rest upon the construction of a plot independent of the assignment of affliction to the protagonist.”

— David Mamet

129. “Train yourself for a profession that does not exist.”

— David Mamet

130. “My tendency as an actor was to correct people, was to say, ‘What if we tried it this way, what about if we tried that way?’ That’s terrible habit for an actor, but that’s a good habit for director. So I became a director.”

— David Mamet

131. “The correct unit of study is not the play; it is the scene.”

— David Mamet

132. “We respond to a drama to that extent to which it corresponds to our dream life.”

— David Mamet

133. “It’s hard to write a good plot, it’s very hard.”

— David Mamet

134. “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.”

— David Mamet

135. “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.”

— David Mamet

136. “One can read all one wants, and spend eternities in front of a blackboard with a tutor, but one is not going to learn to swim until one gets in the water.”

— David Mamet

137. “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.”

— David Mamet

138. “As long as the protagonist wants something, the audience will want something.”

— David Mamet

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

— David Mamet

140. “The audience can endorse the triviality of modern art, but they can’t like it.”

— David Mamet

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

— David Mamet

142. “Conservatives believe in smaller government and in the power of the electorate. So I think that we’re less likely to try to use a dramatic forum to warp people’s political views.”

— David Mamet

143. “I took the liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind.”

— David Mamet

144. “Where in the wide history of the world do we find art created by the excessively wealthy, powerful, or educated?”

— David Mamet

145. “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?”

— David Mamet

146. “But shame, a breaking open of the heart before God, leads, so the Rabbis say, to that true self-knowledge necessary for change. For.”

— David Mamet

147. “Writing a novel is an incredibly free experience. One puts one’s self in a narrative mode. You can go off in any direction – the past, the future, or go laterally, or include one’s own beliefs. It’s total freedom.”

— David Mamet

148. “You know, young actors say all the time, ‘Should I use my own life experience?’ And my response is, ‘What choice do you have?’”

— David Mamet

149. “If, indeed, a firearm were more dangerous to its possessors than to potential aggressors, would it not make sense for the government to arm all criminals, and let them accidentally shoot themselves? Is this absurd? Yes, and yet the government, of course, is arming criminals.”

— David Mamet

150. “You don’t know what life is. You know nothing.”

— David Mamet