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" 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. "

David Mamet

Job

Find

Think

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" What I value most in my friends is loyalty. "

" 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 like Bach. I like Randy Newman. "

" I'm entitled to my political opinions, and I get to vote because I'm an American. "

" In practice we, in the world, must do business with each other. "

" The so-called assault weapons ban is a hoax. It is a political appeal to the ignorant. The guns it supposedly banned have been illegal for 78 years. Did the ban make them 'more' illegal? The ban addresses only the appearance of weapons, not their operation. "

" 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. "

" There's something in me that just wants to create dialogue. "

David Mamet

Something

Dialogue

" 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. "

" I won't ever do e-mail. "

David Mamet

Ever

E-Mail

" It's hard to write a good play because it's hard to structure a plot. If you can think of it off the top of your head, so can the audience. "

" The product of the artist has become less important than the fact of the artist. We wish to absorb this person. We wish to devour someone who has experienced the tragic. In our society this person is much more important than anything he might create. "

" When I started out I was a failed actor. "

" 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. "

" My definition of a 'friend' is, coming from Chicago, someone who says, 'Yeah, sure. You know what? Let's talk about what we can talk about. Let's help each other out. Your politics are none of my business.' "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I'm not the guy to ask about politics. I'm a gag writer. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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

" I'm not an ascetic. "

David Mamet

Ascetic

" 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. "

" When we leave the play saying how spectacular the sets or costumes were, or how interesting the ideas, it means we had a bad time. "

" I've always been more comfortable sinking while clutching a good theory than swimming with an ugly fact. "

David Mamet

Always

Fact

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

" It's upsetting to be a man in our society. "

" 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. "

" They say you can't study Kabbalah until you are at least 40 years old. You know why? You have to have experienced at least one generation making the same mistakes as the previous one. "