Top 100 Mamet's Quotes
#1. [David] Mamet's the writer I admire most but he's way off from when he tries to talk about what the moral appeal of liberal thought is. His heart is not in it.
David Hare
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. I studied acting in NYU's graduate program, in which we covered everything from Ibsen and Chekov to August Wilson and David Mamet.
Andre Holland
#5. I have a ship's bed, which totally plays to my obsession of, if I were not an actress, I would be a pirate.
Zosia Mamet
#6. The conventional wisdom with David Mamet is, you do not change a word. And that agrees with me. If you want to change any of David's words, it's like wanting to change the iambic pentameter in Shakespeare - you should do something else.
John C. McGinley
#7. 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
#8. We all die in the end, but there's no reason to die in the middle.
David Mamet
#9. 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.
David Mamet
#10. 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
#12. I would probably do anything with David Mamet. He's so great. I just love his writing.
Val Kilmer
#13. 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
#14. There's nobody who loves being around actors working more than David Mamet, especially actors bringing his tremendous dialogue to life. I've never seen a movie director who was happier to be directing a movie than Dave.
Clark Gregg
#15. I've been alienating my public since I was 20 years old. When 'American Buffalo' came out on Broadway, people would storm out and say, 'How dare he use that kind of language!' Of course I'm alienating the public! That's what they pay me for.
David Mamet
#16. How can I be secure? (Pause.) 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
#17. 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
#18. Fox: It's lonely at the top.
Gould: But it ain't crowded.
David Mamet
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. I think feminism's a bit misinterpreted. It was about casting off all gender roles. There's nothing wrong with a man holding a door open for a girl. But we sort of threw away all the rules, so everybody's confused. And dating becomes a sloppy, uncomfortable, unpleasant thing.
Zosia Mamet
#22. I'm a little bit of a weirdo - I'm kind of a loner, I didn't go to college, I spend a lot of my time reading. I've been working since I was 17, so that's sort of been my life.
Zosia Mamet
#23. 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
#24. I hate vacations. There's nothing to do.
David Mamet
#25. For me, it's owning the fact that I have a sensitive disposition along with a rampant imagination that makes up stories and convinces me they're true. I feel things intensely, and that sometimes brings me on wave of profound sorrow.
Zosia Mamet
#26. 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
#27. Make the audience wonder what's going on by putting them in the same position as the protagonist.
David Mamet
#28. I've never seen a movie director who was happier to be directing a movie than Dave [Mamet]. His sets, everyone who's ever been involved with one of them will tell you of the funnest, funniest sets you can be on.
Clark Gregg
#29. 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
#30. For an actor, a Mamet play is definitely on the list of things you hope to be a part of before it's time to exit.
T. R. Knight
#31. Any time two characters are talking about a third, the scene is a crock of s***.
David Mamet
#32. David Mamet we all know is a great screenplay writer and playwright and a great director. If you like him, you like him. If you hate him, you really hate him. He's someone who's into controversy, you know what I mean? That's David Mamet.
Tom Hardy
#33. 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
#34. A liberal pretending to be a conservative? That's like a straight person pretending to be gay to get greater acceptance.
David Mamet
#35. It's hard for a Jew of my generation, an American Jew, who is philo-Zionistic, not to romanticize Israel.
David Mamet
#36. We all hope. It's what keeps us alive.
David Mamet
#37. 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.
David Mamet
#38. Put. That coffee. Down. Coffee's for closers only.
David Mamet
#39. Obama is a tyrant the same way FDR was a tyrant. He has a view of presidential power that states: the government is in control of the country, and the president is in charge of the government. He's taken an imperial view of the presidency.
David Mamet
#40. It's hard to write a good plot, it's very hard.
David Mamet
#41. It's not a lie. It's a gift for fiction.
David Mamet
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. I was a good student until I turned 15. Then, all of a sudden, it didn't matter to me anymore. Isn't that funny. I don't want to go to college. I always knew that. But it's hard. My friends are going, and I feel a little left behind.
Clara Mamet
#45. I love working on a typewriter - the rhythm, the sound; it's like playing the piano, which I do, too.
David Mamet
#46. Fun is what you do for yourself. If somebody else does it, it's entertainment.
David Mamet
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. It is the writer's job to make the play interesting. It is the actor's job to make the performance truthful.
David Mamet
#50. There's no such thing as talent; you just have to work hard enough.
David Mamet
#51. The study of acting consists in the main of getting out of one's own way, and in learning to deal with uncertainty and being comfortable being uncomfortable.
David Mamet
#52. I don't think there's any information to be gotten from television.
David Mamet
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. We kept the old male ideas of success: power and money. We need new ones!
Zosia Mamet
#57. Being a writer in Hollywood is like going to Hitler's Eagle Nest with a great idea for a bar mitzvah.
David Mamet
#58. It's called a confidence game. Why? Because you give me your confidence? No. Because I give you mine.
David Mamet
#59. 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
#60. I would have been miserable in college. I always hated school.
Zosia Mamet
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. Hitchcock denigrated American films, saying they were all 'pictures of people talking' - as, indeed, most of them are.
David Mamet
#64. I don't know if I would call myself a religious human.
Zosia Mamet
#65. Old age and treachery will always beat youth and exuberance.
David Mamet
#66. 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
#67. The sad thing is that I know no athletes' names. I am not a sports girl at all.
Clara Mamet
#68. Marijuana, for example, won't help one determine the correct aspect ratio ...
David Mamet
#69. Anyone ever lost in the wild knows that nature wants you dead.
David Mamet
#70. When I was little, I went to a Jewish community day school for most of elementary school.
Clara Mamet
#71. Encounter: Doubt, Shame, Humiliation. It will finally be worth it. Acting is more about courage than anything else.
David Mamet
#72. 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
#73. I'm responding to the will of the people.
David Mamet
#74. People idealize or reminisce about their 20s, but nobody tells you beforehand that it's hard and unglamorous and often very unpleasant.
Zosia Mamet
#75. 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
#76. I go out there. I'm out there every day. [Pause] There is nothing out there.
David Mamet
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. But my father was also the one who told me I needed to clean up my mouth or I'd never find a man. What's very important to him is manners. Show up on time. Always send thank-you letters. He is one of the more thoughtful humans I've ever met. He's a great man and a very good dad.
Zosia Mamet
#80. 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
#81. It's only words... unless they're true.
David Mamet
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. Always tell the truth - it's the easiest thing to remember.
David Mamet
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. I don't watch much television. My old TV agent used to always get mad at me because he'd send me out on auditions and I'd be like, 'What's this show?' and he'd be like, 'It's literally the top show on television.' I wasn't allowed to watch TV as a kid.
Zosia Mamet
#90. Everybody makes their own fun. If you don't make it yourself, it isn't fun. It's entertainment.
David Mamet
#91. [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
#92. Well, there are those who would say it's a form of aggression."
"What is?"
"A surprise.
David Mamet
#93. It's upsetting to be a man in our society.
David Mamet
#94. There's something in me that just wants to create dialogue.
David Mamet
#95. The images in a dream are vastly varied and magnificently interesting.
David Mamet
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. The audience requires not information but drama.
David Mamet
#99. I think I'm better than Mamet, I would say.
Adam McKay
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