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" I don't think there's any information to be gotten from television. "
David Mamet
Television
Information
Any
Related Quotes:
" 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. "
David Mamet
Own
Culture
Up
" Being among my people is a delight. We Jews live among ourselves. I love it. "
David Mamet
Delight
Being
Jews
" I'm not an ascetic. "
David Mamet
Ascetic
" The essence of jiu-jitsu is philosophy. "
David Mamet
Philosophy
Essence
" President Obama seems to understand the Constitution as a 'set of suggestions.' "
David Mamet
Understand
President
Constitution
" 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
Peace
Tragedy
War
" 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
Lawyer
Immigrant
College
" 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. "
David Mamet
Yourself
You
Stage
" You can't write about history without writing about politics at some point. History is about movements of people. 'What is criminality and what is government' is a theme that runs through every history. "
David Mamet
People
Politics
Government
" Every reiteration of the idea that nothing matters debases the human spirit. "
David Mamet
Spirit
Matters
Nothing
" I'm afraid of only two things: being lazy and being cowardly. "
David Mamet
Afraid
Only
Things
" The individual is not only best qualified to provide his own personal defense, he is the only one qualified to do so: and his right to do so is guaranteed by the Constitution. "
David Mamet
Personal
Own
Constitution
" My dad was a labour lawyer, and the ideas that I grew up with - bad management, bad capitalism, robber barons - when I applied this to my own life, I saw that we are all on both sides of the coin. "
David Mamet
Ideas
Bad
Life
" 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
Greed
Peace
Evil
" 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
Listen
Admire
Down
" 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
Arts
Good
Invention
" 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
Understand
Bad
Computers
" The basis of drama is... the struggle of the hero towards a specific goal at the end of which he realises that what kept him from it was, in the lesser drama, civilisation 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. "
David Mamet
Struggle
Drama
Great
" I don't really have a social life. "
David Mamet
Social
Really
Life
" 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. "
David Mamet
Out
Work
Well
" I won't ever do e-mail. "
David Mamet
Ever
E-Mail
" 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
Good
Time
Situation
" I like Bach. I like Randy Newman. "
David Mamet
Randy
Bach
Newman
" I hate vacations. There's nothing to do. "
David Mamet
Vacations
Hate
Nothing
" 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
Movies
Never
Just
" 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
Service
World
Phone
" 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
Way
Always
Drama
" There's something in me that just wants to create dialogue. "
David Mamet
Something
Me
Dialogue
" I've always been fascinated by the picaresque. "
David Mamet
Fascinated
Been
Always
" 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
Heaven
Fly
Science