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David Mamet Quotes | Quotes said by David Mamet

  • David Mamet Quote #1

    ...My dad, may he rest in
    peace, taught me many wonderful things. And one of the things he taught me was never ask a guy what you do for a living.

    He said If you think about it, when you ask a guy, what do you do you do for a living, you’re saying how may I gauge the rest of your utterances. are you smarter than I am? Are you richer than I am, poorer than I am?

    So you ask a guy what do you do for a living, it’s the same thing as
    asking a guy, let me know what your politics are before I listen to you so
    I know whether or not you’re part of my herd, in which case I can nod
    knowingly, or part of the other herd, in which case I can wish you dead.


  • David Mamet Quote #2

    A play is basically a long, formalistic polemic. You can write it without the poetry, and if you do, you may have a pretty good play. We know this because we see plays in translation. Not many people speak Norwegian or Danish or whatever guys like Ibsen spoke, or Russian - yet we understand Chekhov and the others.

  • David Mamet Quote #3

    All drama is about lies. All drama is about something that’s hidden. A drama starts because a situation becomes imbalanced by a lie. The lie may be something we tell each other or something we think about ourselves, but the lie imbalances a situation. If you’re cheating on your wife the repression of that puts things out of balance; or if you’re someone you think you’re not, and you think you should be further ahead in your job, that neurotic vision takes over your life and you’re plagued by it until you’re cleansed. At the end of a play the lie is revealed. The better the play the more surprising and inevitable the lie is. Aristotle told us this

  • David Mamet Quote #4

    Every reiteration of the idea that _nothing matters_ debases the human spirit.

    Every reiteration of the idea that there is no drama in modern life, there is only dramatization, that there is no tragedy, there is only unexplained misfortune, debases us. It denies what we know to be true. In denying what we know, we are as a nation which cannot remember its dreams--like an unhappy person who cannot remember his dreams and so denies that he does dream, and denies that there are such things as dreams.

  • David Mamet Quote #5

    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 Quote #6

    Here's what happens in a play. You get involved in a situation where something is unbalanced. If nothing's unbalanced, there's no reason to have a play. If Hamlet comes home from school, and his dad's not dead and asks him if he's had a good time, it's boring. But if something's unbalanced, it must be returned to order.

  • David Mamet Quote #7

    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 Quote #8

    I'm afraid of only two things: being lazy and being cowardly. I get up early in the morning and go to work. I love to write.

  • David Mamet Quote #9

    If I could go back would I do it differently? Well, I can't go back.

  • David Mamet Quote #10

    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 Quote #11

    It's only words... unless they're true.

  • David Mamet Quote #12

    Liberalism is a religion. Its tenets cannot be proved, its capacity for waste and destruction demonstrated. But it affords a feeling of spiritual rectitude at little or no cost.

  • David Mamet Quote #13

    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 Quote #14

    My Alma mater is the Chicago Public Library.

  • David Mamet Quote #15

    My dad was an immigrant kid and a Democrat and a Jew, and we didn't know any Republicans in our group. So I grew up Democratic. My dad was a labor lawyer - a very hardworking guy, a one-horse labor lawyer - and then I went to hippie college and lived in the bubble.

  • David Mamet Quote #16

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

  • David Mamet Quote #17

    My idea of perfect happiness is a healthy family, peace between nations, and all the critics die.

  • David Mamet Quote #18

    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 Quote #19

    Old age and treachery will always beat youth and exuberance.

  • David Mamet Quote #20

    Put. That coffee. Down. Coffee's for closers only.

  • David Mamet Quote #21

    Society functions in a way much more interesting than the multiple-choice pattern we have been rewarded for succeeding at in school. Success in life comes not from the ability to choose between the four presented answers, but from the rather more difficult and painfully acquired ability to formulate the questions.

  • David Mamet Quote #22

    Superman comics are a fable, not of strength, but of disintegration. They appeal to the preadolescent, (sic) mind not because they reiterate grandiose delusions, but because they reiterate a very deep cry for help.
    Superman's two personalities can be integrated only in one thing: only in death. Only Kryptonite cuts through the disguises of both wimp and hero, and affects the man below the disguises.
    And what is Kryptonite? Kryptonite is all that remains of his childhood home.
    It is the remnants of that destroyed childhood home, and the fear of those remnants, which rule Superman's life. The possibility that the shards of that destroyed home might surface prevents him from being intimate- they prevent him from sharing the knowledge that the wimp and the hero are one. The fear of his childhood home prevents him from having pleasure.
    He fears that to reveal his weakness, and confusion, is, perhaps indirectly, but certainly inevitably, to receive death from the person who received that information.
    [...]
    Far from being invulnerable, Superman is the most vulnerable of beings, because his childhood was destroyed. He can never reintegrate himself by returning to that home- it is gone. It is gone and he is living among aliens to whom he cannot even reveal his rightful name.

  • David Mamet Quote #23

    The basis of drama is ... is the struggle of the hero towards a specific goal at the end of which he realizes that what kept him from it was, in the lesser drama, civilization and, in the great drama, the discovery of something that he did not set out to discover but which can be seen retrospectively as inevitable. The example Aristotle uses, of course, is Oedipus.

  • David Mamet Quote #24

    The Founders recognized that Government is quite literally a necessary evil, that there must be opposition, between its various branches, and between political parties, for these are the only ways to temper the individual's greed for power and the electorates' desires for peace by submission to coercion or blandishment.

  • David Mamet Quote #25

    The honest man might observe... that no one gets something for nothing; that politicians go in poor and go out rich; that the Government screws up everything it touches; and that the Will to Believe is best confined to the Religious Venue, as to practice it elsewhere is just too damned expensive.

  • David Mamet Quote #26

    The leaf of the camomile, parboiled in water, conduces to calm. And yet I do not worship it.

  • David Mamet Quote #27

    The poker player learns that sometimes both science and common sense are wrong; that the bumblebee can fly; that, perhaps, one should never trust an expert; that there are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of by those with an academic bent.

  • David Mamet Quote #28

    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 Quote #29

    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 Quote #30

    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.

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