Top 100 David Mamet Quotes
#1. The so-called assault weapons ban is a hoax. It is a political appeal to the ignorant. The guns it supposedly banned have been illegal for 78 years. Did the ban make them 'more' illegal? The ban addresses only the appearance of weapons, not their operation.
David Mamet
#2. You got an all-out prize fight, you wait 'til the fight's over, one guy's left standing and that's how you know who's won.
David Mamet
#3. Encounter: Doubt, Shame, Humiliation. It will finally be worth it. Acting is more about courage than anything else.
David Mamet
#4. Marijuana, for example, won't help one determine the correct aspect ratio ...
David Mamet
#5. I don't think there's any information to be gotten from television.
David Mamet
#6. Hitchcock denigrated American films, saying they were all 'pictures of people talking' - as, indeed, most of them are.
David Mamet
#7. 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.
David Mamet
#8. The audience requires not information but drama.
David Mamet
#9. The images in a dream are vastly varied and magnificently interesting.
David Mamet
#10. 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
#11. 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.
David Mamet
#12. Culture exists and evolves to relegate to habit categories of interactions the constant conscious reference to which would make human interaction impossible.
David Mamet
#13. It's upsetting to be a man in our society.
David Mamet
#14. The terror and beauty of the dream come from the connection of previously unrelated mundanities of life.
David Mamet
#15. The theatre is traditionally where people go to hear the truth.
David Mamet
#16. Everybody makes their own fun. If you don't make it yourself, it isn't fun. It's entertainment.
David Mamet
#17. All fears are one fear. Just the fear of death. And we accept it, then we are at peace.
David Mamet
#18. The correct unit of study is not the play; it is the scene.
David Mamet
#19. 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
#20. The surprise is half the battle. Many things are half the battle, losing is half the battle. Let's think about what's the whole battle.
David Mamet
#21. Blasphemy and prayer are one. Both assert the existence of a superior power. The first, however, with conviction.
David Mamet
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. Always do things the least interesting way, the most blunt way, and you make a better movie. This is my experience.
David Mamet
#25. Invent nothing, deny nothing, speak up, stand up, stay out of school.
David Mamet
#26. We Americans have always considered Hollywood, at best, a sinkhole of depraved venality. And, of course, it is. It is not a protective monastery of aesthetic truth. It is a place where everything is incredibly expensive.
David Mamet
#27. 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
#28. People may or may not say what they mean ... but they always say something designed to get what they want.
David Mamet
#29. Policemen so cherish their status as keepers of the peace and protectors of the public that they have occasionally been known to beat to death those citizens or groups who question that status.
David Mamet
#30. 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
#32. There is no such thing as character other than the habitual action, as Mr. Aristotle told us two thousand years ago.
David Mamet
#33. What I value most in my friends is loyalty.
David Mamet
#34. Every scene should be able to answer three questions: Who wants what from whom? What happens if they don't get it? Why now?
David Mamet
#35. My greatest fear is that the audience will beat me to the punch line.
David Mamet
#36. It's only words... unless they're true.
David Mamet
#37. You don't know what life is. You know nothing.
David Mamet
#38. Today, as in ancient Rome, when all avenues of success have been traveled and all prizes won, the final prize is the delusion of godhead.
David Mamet
#39. 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
#40. The true writer must write not the acceptable but the true.
David Mamet
#41. The work of the director is the work of constructing the shot list from the script.
David Mamet
#42. They say you can't study Kabbalah until you are at least 40 years old. You know why? You have to have experienced at least one generation making the same mistakes as the previous one.
David Mamet
#43. You want to get Capone? Here's how you get him: he pulls a knife, you pull a gun, he sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. It's the Chicago way and that's how you get Capone.
David Mamet
#44. "Based on a true story" is a come-on, the aesthetic equivalent of "no loan request refused." For, at best, the creator has fashioned a film based on his understanding of, interpretation of, and reduction of the report of an actual occurrence.
David Mamet
#45. You get rich through luck. You get rich through crime. You get rich through fulfilling the needs of another. You can be as greedy as you like. If you can't do one of those three things, you ain't going to get any money.
David Mamet
#46. 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
#47. The dream and the film are the juxtaposition of images in order to answer a question.
David Mamet
#48. If I could go back would I do it differently? Well, I can't go back.
David Mamet
#49. 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.
David Mamet
#50. I hate vacations. There's nothing to do.
David Mamet
#51. 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
#52. Storytelling is like sex. We all do it naturally. Some of us are better at it than others.
David Mamet
#53. The problem play is a melodrama cleansed of invention.
David Mamet
#54. Almost all movie scripts contain material that cannot be filmed.
David Mamet
#55. My motto is "Be Prepared." I am told this is also the motto of the Boy Scouts, but, if so, this only proves that they were acting according to my motto earlier than I.
David Mamet
#56. What is our life: (Pause.) it's looking forward or it's looking back. And that's our life. That's it. Where is the moment?
David Mamet
#57. You can't rely on the acting to tell the story.
David Mamet
#58. Art is an expression of joy and awe. It is not an attempt to share one's virtues and accomplishments with the audience, but an act of selfless spirit.
David Mamet
#59. I've always been fascinated by the picaresque.
David Mamet
#60. Mixed martial arts was invented by Brazilians, whose families had been trained by the Japanese. Those Brazilians came to the U.S., where their invention was bought out, gussied up and presented to the world, which found it good.
David Mamet
#61. Before you can steal fire from the Gods you gotta be able to get coffee for the director
David Mamet
#62. 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
#63. In the meantime: (1) be direct; (2) remember that, being smarter than men, women respond to courtesy and kindness; (3) if you want to know what kind of a wife someone will make, observe her around her father and mother; (4) as to who gets out of the elevator first, I just can't help you.
David Mamet
#64. The essence of jiu-jitsu is philosophy.
David Mamet
#65. They say the definition of ambivalence is watching your mother-in-law drive over a cliff in your new Cadillac.
David Mamet
#66. I don't have any experience with film schools. I suspect that they're useless, because I've had experience with drama schools, and have found them to be useless.
David Mamet
#67. We all die in the end, but there's no reason to die in the middle.
David Mamet
#68. 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.
David Mamet
#69. The first amendment ensures not that speech will be fair, but that it will be free. It cannot be both.
David Mamet
#70. Life in the movie business is like the beginning of a new love affair: it's full of surprises, and you're constantly getting fucked.
David Mamet
#71. Art is about the spontaneous connection of the artist to his own unconscious - about insight beyond reason. If his insight were reasonable, anyone could do it, but anyone cannot. Only few can, and they are called.
David Mamet
#72. There's no such thing as talent; you just have to work hard enough.
David Mamet
#73. There is a profound and ineradicable taint of antisemitism in the British.
David Mamet
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. Fun is what you do for yourself. If somebody else does it, it's entertainment.
David Mamet
#77. I love working on a typewriter - the rhythm, the sound; it's like playing the piano, which I do, too.
David Mamet
#78. I always thought the real violence in Hollywood isn't what's on the screen. It's what you have to do to raise the money.
David Mamet
#79. For we rationalize, objectify, and personalize the process of the game exactly as we do that of a play, a drama. For, finally, it is a drama, with meaning for our lives. Why else would we watch it?
David Mamet
#81. However much our quotidian cares consume us, our dreamtime is too valuable, and will be devoted to problems not susceptible to rational consideration.
David Mamet
#82. 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
#83. The government, for example, has determined that black people (somehow) have fewer abilities than white people, and, so, must be given certain preferences. Anyone acquainted with both black and white people knows this assessment is not only absurd but monstrous. And yet it is the law.
David Mamet
#84. My Alma mater is the Chicago Public Library.
David Mamet
#85. We all hope. It's what keeps us alive.
David Mamet
#86. 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.'
David Mamet
#87. Being among my people is a delight. We Jews live among ourselves. I love it.
David Mamet
#89. It's hard for a Jew of my generation, an American Jew, who is philo-Zionistic, not to romanticize Israel.
David Mamet
#90. The greater the intellect, the more ease in its misdirection.
David Mamet
#91. 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
#92. 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.
David Mamet
#93. I took the liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind.
David Mamet
#94. Opportunity may knock, but it seldom nags.
David Mamet
#95. Here is a sovereign talisman against regret: never do that which might engender it.
David Mamet
#96. The liberals in my neighbourhood wouldn't give away Brentwood to the Palestinians, but they want to give away Tel Aviv.
David Mamet
#97. 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
#98. Make the audience wonder what's going on by putting them in the same position as the protagonist.
David Mamet
#99. I'm greedy and ambitious like everybody else.
David Mamet
#100. The purpose of technique is to free the unconscious. If you follow the rules ploddingly, they will allow your unconscious to be free.
David Mamet
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
