Top 200 David Mamet Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 4 of 4

151. “The great movie can be as free of being a record of the progress of the protagonist as is a dream.”

— David Mamet

152. “Fun is what you do for yourself. If somebody else does it, it’s entertainment.”

— David Mamet

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

— David Mamet

154. “Cultivate a love of skill. Learn theatrical skills. They will give you continual pleasure, self-confidence, and link you to fifty thousand years of the history of our profession.”

— David Mamet

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

— David Mamet

156. “The true writer must write not the acceptable but the true.”

— David Mamet

157. “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.”

— David Mamet

158. “Films have degenerated to their original operation as carnival amusement – they offer not drama but thrills.”

— David Mamet

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

— David Mamet

160. “The terror and beauty of the dream come from the connection of previously unrelated mundanities of life.”

— David Mamet

161. “I’ve been alienating my public since I was 20 years old.”

— David Mamet

162. “I like Bach. I like Randy Newman.”

— David Mamet

163. “I don’t think there’s any information to be gotten from television.”

— David Mamet

164. “I know very well what it is to be out of work and to be cheated by employers and I know what it is to be an employer.”

— David Mamet

165. “I used to think I’d like to be a fireman – in fact, I still would – and the only drawback I could see was coming back to the firehouse, after a day of fighting fires, and still having to put in an eight-hour day writing.”

— David Mamet

166. “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

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

— David Mamet

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

— David Mamet

169. “The political impulse, similarly, must, however manifested, proceed from a universal urge to order social relations. Emotions.”

— David Mamet

170. “In my family, in the days prior to television, we liked to while away the evenings by making ourselves miserable, solely based on our ability to speak the language viciously.”

— David Mamet

171. “In Chicago, we love our crooks!”

— David Mamet

172. “We recipients of the boon of liberty have always been ready, when faced with discomfort, to discard any and all first principles of liberty, and, further, to indict those who do not freely join with us in happily arrogating those principles.”

— David Mamet

173. “When I started out I was a failed actor.”

— David Mamet

174. “The Israelis would like to live in peace within their borders; the Arabs would like to kill them all.”

— David Mamet

175. “I won’t ever do e-mail.”

— David Mamet

176. “Many players will not improve because they cannot bear self-knowledge.”

— David Mamet

177. “If You can’t tell it to me in one sentence, they can’t put it in TV Guide.”

— David Mamet

178. “Almost all movie scripts contain material that cannot be filmed.”

— David Mamet

179. “Flattery takes away the capacity of the listener to make a rational, unbiased opinion.”

— David Mamet

180. “I’m afraid of only two things: being lazy and being cowardly.”

— David Mamet

181. “I love all insider memoirs. It doesn’t matter whether it’s truck-drivers or doctors. I think everybody likes to go backstage, find out what people think and what they talk about and what specialised job they have.”

— David Mamet

182. “President Obama seems to understand the Constitution as a ‘set of suggestions.’”

— David Mamet

183. “Matrimony and monogamy have forever been linked with property and inheritance, the nuclear family, in the West, having been decided upon through trial and error as the most effective unit for preservation of both. In.”

— David Mamet

184. “People only speak to get something.”

— David Mamet

185. “You can’t write about history without writing about politics at some point. History is about movements of people. ‘What is criminality and what is government’ is a theme that runs through every history.”

— David Mamet

186. “The millennia-long evolution of the human family as a means of dealing with the environment was discarded by my generation of fantasists, in favor of a concept not only artificial, but inchoate: “freedom” – the pursuit of which has led to misery.”

— David Mamet

187. “The quality I most admire in a man is steadfastness.”

— David Mamet

188. “There’s something in me that just wants to create dialogue.”

— David Mamet

189. “I’m entitled to my political opinions, and I get to vote because I’m an American.”

— David Mamet

190. “The first amendment ensures not that speech will be fair, but that it will be free. It cannot be both.”

— David Mamet

191. “For it is written that just as it is forbidden to partake of the forbidden, it is forbidden not to partake of the permitted.”

— David Mamet

192. “The audience perceives only what the actor wants to do to the other actor.”

— David Mamet

193. “There is a profound and ineradicable taint of antisemitism in the British.”

— David Mamet

194. “The man had been the head of the postwar European operation called Aliyah Bet, the clandestine resettlement of the Jewish remnant of the Holocaust in Palestine. He had come to this position as a senior member of the Palmach, the fighting arm of the Haganah, which was the underground Jewish Army in Palestine, under the British Mandate.”

— David Mamet

195. “It is more frightening but it is not less productive to go your own way, to form your own theatre company, to write and stage your own plays, to make your own films. You have an enormously greater chance of eventually presenting yourself to, and eventually appealing to, an audience by striking out on your own, by making your own plays and films, than by submitting to the industrial model of the school and studio.”

— David Mamet

196. “I don’t really have a social life.”

— David Mamet

197. “CHARLES: I believe that any professional bears the shame of the questionable worth of his ministrations. I know of my racket what you know of yours: that, for the most part, we are paid for the ability to keep a straight face. While accomplishing little or nothing.”

— David Mamet

198. “I’m not the guy to ask about politics. I’m a gag writer.”

— David Mamet

199. “If I could go back would I do it differently? Well, I can’t go back.”

— David Mamet

200. “When you leave the theater wanting to discuss the play, that’s a good play. When you leave the theater wanting to discuss your life and the world, that’s art.”

— David Mamet