Famous Quotes by David Mamet

“We must have a pie. Stress cannot exist in the presence of a pie.”

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.

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.

Old age and treachery will always beat youth and exuberance.

I'm afraid of only two things: being lazy and being cowardly.

If the scene bores you when you read it, rest assured it WILL bore the actors, and will then bore the audience, and we're all going to be back in the breadline.

A dramatic experience concerned with the mundane may inform but it cannot release; and one concerned essentially with the aesthetic politics of its creators may divert or anger, but it cannot enlighten.

The terror and beauty of the dream come from the connection of previously unrelated mundanities of life.

The dream and the film are the juxtaposition of images in order to answer a question.

At the Neighborhood Playhouse School of Theatre, Sanford Meisner said, 'When you go into the professional world, at a stock theatre somewhere, backstage, you will meet an older actor, someone who has been around awhile. He will tell you tales and anecdotes, about life in the theatre. He will speak to you about your performance and the performances of others, and he will generalize to you, based on his experience and his intuitions, about the laws of the stage. Ignore this man!'

The business of theatre is to make money, but the art of theatre is to make you feel something.

The basis of drama 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 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.

Invent nothing, deny nothing, speak up, stand up, stay out of school.

Acting is not a genteel profession. Actors used to be buried at a crossroads with a stake through their hearts.

Art is the continual self-revelation of the human being.

A writer's job is to answer questions that have never been asked before.

When we fear things I think that we wish for them... every fear hides a wish.

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.

Anyone ever lost in the wild knows that nature wants you dead.

You never open your mouth till you know what the shot is.

The truth is that a writer who wishes to succeed is not concerned with the truth of things but with what people want to believe.