Top 100 Mamet Quotes
#1. I go out there. I'm out there every day. [Pause] There is nothing out there.
David Mamet
#2. 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
#3. People idealize or reminisce about their 20s, but nobody tells you beforehand that it's hard and unglamorous and often very unpleasant.
Zosia Mamet
#4. I'm responding to the will of the people.
David Mamet
#5. 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
#6. Encounter: Doubt, Shame, Humiliation. It will finally be worth it. Acting is more about courage than anything else.
David Mamet
#7. When I was little, I went to a Jewish community day school for most of elementary school.
Clara Mamet
#8. Anyone ever lost in the wild knows that nature wants you dead.
David Mamet
#9. Marijuana, for example, won't help one determine the correct aspect ratio ...
David Mamet
#10. The sad thing is that I know no athletes' names. I am not a sports girl at all.
Clara Mamet
#11. Preston Sturges is one of my favorites. I learned about dialogue and timing from him - louder, faster, funnier. But I do love Mel Brooks.
Clara Mamet
#12. I don't think there's any information to be gotten from television.
David Mamet
#13. I don't know if I would call myself a religious human.
Zosia Mamet
#14. Hitchcock denigrated American films, saying they were all 'pictures of people talking' - as, indeed, most of them are.
David Mamet
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. I would have been miserable in college. I always hated school.
Zosia Mamet
#18. 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
#19. It's called a confidence game. Why? Because you give me your confidence? No. Because I give you mine.
David Mamet
#20. Being a writer in Hollywood is like going to Hitler's Eagle Nest with a great idea for a bar mitzvah.
David Mamet
#21. We kept the old male ideas of success: power and money. We need new ones!
Zosia Mamet
#22. There are directors you never, ever want to get close to. Lubitsch was one. Outside of the work, I don't think I ever said five words to him. Mamet was pretty much the same thing. His mind is working all the time.
Don Ameche
#23. 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
#25. Old age and treachery will always beat youth and exuberance.
David Mamet
#27. I think I'm better than Mamet, I would say.
Adam McKay
#28. The audience requires not information but drama.
David Mamet
#29. David Mamet was great to work with. He was everything that I thought he would be as a director. He's incredibly articulate, an easy collaborator. Extraordinarily knowledgeable about film and writing.
Chiwetel Ejiofor
#30. 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
#31. The images in a dream are vastly varied and magnificently interesting.
David Mamet
#32. When I started out I was a failed actor.
David Mamet
#33. There's something in me that just wants to create dialogue.
David Mamet
#34. For the record, if you're not a stage actor, climbing onto Broadway and tackling something like David Mamet is not an easy thing to do.
Jeremy Piven
#35. I wrote and directed a movie called 'Two-Bit Waltz.'
Clara Mamet
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. Culture exists and evolves to relegate to habit categories of interactions the constant conscious reference to which would make human interaction impossible.
David Mamet
#39. David Mamet's writing is pretty spectacular, obviously. I like the honesty of it; I like how funny it is and how sad it is.
T. R. Knight
#40. It's upsetting to be a man in our society.
David Mamet
#41. The terror and beauty of the dream come from the connection of previously unrelated mundanities of life.
David Mamet
#42. Well, there are those who would say it's a form of aggression."
"What is?"
"A surprise.
David Mamet
#43. My parents have always been very supportive. I didn't go to school because my home was my school.
Clara Mamet
#44. We're all put to the test ... but it never comes in the form or at the point we would prefer, does it?
David Mamet
#45. [David] Mamet is another hypocrite. His idea of Black man is a pimp who abuses women, [Edmond], yet his play Oleanna [1994] ends with a White professor slapping an uppity feminist, at least the version I saw at San Francisco's ACT.
Ishmael Reed
#47. The great movie can be as free of being a record of the progress of the protagonist as is a dream.
David Mamet
#48. The theatre is traditionally where people go to hear the truth.
David Mamet
#49. Everybody makes their own fun. If you don't make it yourself, it isn't fun. It's entertainment.
David Mamet
#50. All fears are one fear. Just the fear of death. And we accept it, then we are at peace.
David Mamet
#51. I'm doing this play right now, the new David Mamet play. It's called 'Race,' and it's very interesting how people really leave the theater filled with the desire to talk about the play and the issues and the characters, and how they're all navigating their personal views around race.
Kerry Washington
#52. 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.
David Mamet
#53. When we fear things I think that we wish for them ... every fear hides a wish
David Mamet
#54. I grew up backstage and on movie sets, and I thought they were the most magical places on Earth.
Zosia Mamet
#56. Acting is a whole boatload of fun, but I prefer to do it on my own terms.
Clara Mamet
#57. The correct unit of study is not the play; it is the scene.
David Mamet
#58. The secret knowledge is there's nobody home but us chickens. The Constitution was written by a bunch of regular guys who tried to get together and thrash out a contract under which they could get together that would keep people together.
David Mamet
#59. This 'one big plan' thinking leads to a lot of the problems we're facing.
Clara Mamet
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. How was her crumbcake?
oh.. from the store ...
...
David Mamet
#63. Always tell the truth - it's the easiest thing to remember.
David Mamet
#64. Blasphemy and prayer are one. Both assert the existence of a superior power. The first, however, with conviction.
David Mamet
#65. I did 'Mad Men' and I still have people come up to me like, 'Are you actually a lesbian?' Really? Just because I play one on TV? People will think what they're gonna think.
Zosia Mamet
#66. I tend to write a lot, which I think is the secret to being prolific.
David Mamet
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. Always do things the least interesting way, the most blunt way, and you make a better movie. This is my experience.
David Mamet
#70. I haven't found it to be particularly enjoyable ... ninety percent of the time when I go on dates, I'm thinking, 'I could be reading my book instead.'
Zosia Mamet
#71. Invent nothing, deny nothing, speak up, stand up, stay out of school.
David Mamet
#72. I liked to think I had written 'scripts' when I was in high school, but looking back at them, they were about thirty pages of wannabe-Mamet dialogue with a staple through them.
Lorene Scafaria
#73. I understand that computers, which I once believed to be but a hermaphrodite typewriter-cum-filing cabinet, offer the cyber literate increased ability to communicate. I do not think this is altogether a bad thing, however it may appear on the surface.
David Mamet
#74. 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
#75. Film is a collaborative business: bend over.
David Mamet
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. I'm not the guy to ask about politics. I'm a gag writer.
David Mamet
#79. I grew up in a tough neighborhood and we used to say you can get further with a kind word and a gun than just a kind word.
David Mamet
#80. People may or may not say what they mean ... but they always say something designed to get what they want.
David Mamet
#81. I learned a long time ago from David Mamet to wipe your feet at the door, get it out on stage and then go about your life.
Patti LuPone
#82. 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
#83. My mom was onstage when she was pregnant with me.
Zosia Mamet
#84. 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
#85. FAUSTUS. To have fooled the philosopher.
MAGUS. One finds, in my profession, sir, the greater the intellect, the more ease in its misdirection.
FAUSTUS. One finds the same in mine.
David Mamet
#86. 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
#90. If You can't tell it to me in one sentence, they can't put it in TV Guide.
David Mamet
#91. There is no such thing as character other than the habitual action, as Mr. Aristotle told us two thousand years ago.
David Mamet
#92. What I value most in my friends is loyalty.
David Mamet
#93. 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
#94. Success isn't about winning everything; it's about achieving your dream, be that teaching middle school or flying jets. And no matter what we as individual women want, no matter what our goals, we have to support one another.
Zosia Mamet
#95. My greatest fear is that the audience will beat me to the punch line.
David Mamet
#96. It's only words... unless they're true.
David Mamet
#97. You don't know what life is. You know nothing.
David Mamet
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. To find beauty in the sad, hope in the midst of loss, and dignity in failure is great poetic art.
David Mamet
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