Show business is and has always been a depraved carnival.
DAVID MAMET, True and False
Don't assume I'm dumb because I wear a suit and tie.
When you come into the theater, 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, Three Uses of the Knife
When the gods would make us mad, they answer our prayers.
DAVID MAMET, Speed-the-Plow
The mind is a mill which can incessant turn, 'til its mere operation focus the stress inward and the stones grind themselves to dust.
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, Writing in Restaurants
When we fear things I think that we wish for them ... every fear hides a wish.
All fears are one fear. Just the fear of death. And we accept it, then we are at peace.
DAVID MAMET, Speed-the-Plow
The most charming of theories holds that someone other than Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare's plays -- that he was of too low a state, and of insufficient education. But where in the wide history of the world do we find art created by the excessively wealthy, powerful, or educated?
DAVID MAMET, True and False
No one enjoys being equal.
DAVID MAMET, Goldberg Street: Short Plays and Monologues
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, Writing in Restaurants
Many remark justice is blind; pity those in her sway, shocked to discover she is also deaf.
We all hope. It's what keeps us alive.
DAVID MAMET, Speed-the-Plow
All of us. All of us. We're doomed.
One can read all one wants, and spend eternities in front of a blackboard with a tutor, but one is not going to learn to swim until one gets in the water.
DAVID MAMET, True and False
Love. My golly, it sells diapers, don't it!
DAVID MAMET, Goldberg Street: Short Plays and Monologues
The avant-garde is to the left what jingoism is to the right. Both are a refuge in nonsense.
DAVID MAMET, Three Uses of the Knife
Here is a sovereign talisman against regret: never do that which might engender it.
You don't know what life is. You know nothing.
DAVID MAMET, Goldberg Street: Short Plays and Monologues
Blasphemy and prayer are one. Both assert the existence of a superior power. The first, however, with conviction.
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, Three Uses of the Knife
Get into the scene late, get out of the scene early.
DAVID MAMET, The Paris Review, spring 1997
I examined my Liberalism and found it like an addiction to roulette. Here, though the odds are plain, and the certainty of loss apparent to anyone with a knowledge of arithmetic, the addict, failing time and again, is convinced he yet is graced with the power to contravene natural laws. The roulette addict, when he invariably comes to grief, does not examine either the nature of roulette, or of his delusion, but retires to develop a new system, and to scheme for more funds.
DAVID MAMET, The Secret Knowledge
We must have a pie. Stress cannot exist in the presence of a pie.
DAVID MAMET, Boston Marriage
In playwriting, you’ve got to be able to write dialogue. And if you write enough of it and let it flow enough, you’ll probably come across something that will give you a key as to structure. I think the process of writing a play is working back and forth between the moment and the whole. The moment and the whole, the fluidity of the dialogue and the necessity of a strict construction. Letting one predominate for a while and coming back and fixing it so that eventually what you do, like a pastry chef, is frost your mistakes, if you can.
DAVID MAMET, The Paris Review, spring 1997
The greater the intellect, the more ease in its misdirection.
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, The Secret Knowledge
Freud believed that our dreams sometimes recapitulate a speech, a comment we’ve heard or something that we’ve read. I always had compositions in my dreams. They would be a joke, a piece of a novel, a witticism or a piece of dialogue from a play, and I would dream them. I would actually express them line by line in the dream. Sometimes after waking up I would remember a snatch or two and write them down. There’s something in me that just wants to create dialogue.
DAVID MAMET, The Paris Review, spring 1997
The job of mass entertainment is to cajole, seduce and flatter consumers to let them know that what they thought was right is right, and that their tastes and their immediate gratification are of the utmost concern of the purveyor. The job of the artist, on the other hand, is to say, wait a second, to the contrary, everything that we have thought is wrong. Let's reexamine it.
DAVIE MAMET, Salon interview, 1997
Put. That coffee. Down. Coffee's for closers only.
DAVID MAMET, Glengarry Glen Ross
|
