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All Quotes by author - David Mamet

" A good film script should be able to do completely without dialogue. "

" A liberal pretending to be a conservative? That's like a straight person pretending to be gay to get greater acceptance. "

" Always tell the truth - it's the easiest thing to remember. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Art and mass entertainment and propaganda, they can all be plotted on the same graph, but there is a difference. "

" 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. "

" Being among my people is a delight. We Jews live among ourselves. I love it. "

" 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. "

" Culture exists and evolves to relegate to habit categories of interactions the constant conscious reference to which would make human interaction impossible. "

" Each culture has its own form of staged combat, evolved from its particular method of street fighting and cleaned up for presentation as a spectacle, e.g. savate, Cornish wrestling, karate, kung-fu. "

" Every reiteration of the idea that nothing matters debases the human spirit. "

" Films have degenerated to their original operation as carnival amusement - they offer not drama but thrills. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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.' "

" I don't really have a social life. "

" I don't think there's any information to be gotten from television. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I hate the computer. I hate their spell-check. I won't ever do e-mail. "

" I hate vacations. There's nothing to do. "

" I know very well what it is to be out of work and to be cheated by employers and I know what it is to be an employer. "

" I like Bach. I like Randy Newman. "

" 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. "

" I look back upon 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. "

" 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. "

" I love the British. "

" I love working on a typewriter - the rhythm, the sound; it's like playing the piano, which I do, too. "

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