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" I'm not an ascetic. "
David Mamet
Ascetic
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" 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. "
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" It's only words... unless they're true. "
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" 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. "
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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. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" It is not the constitutional prerogative of the Government to determine needs. "
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Determine
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" There's no such thing as talent; you just have to work hard enough. "
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Talent
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You
" 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. "
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Lawyer
Immigrant
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" 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. "
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" In Chicago, we love our crooks! "
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" 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. "
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Government
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" I've always been fascinated by the picaresque. "
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Fascinated
Been
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" A good film script should be able to do completely without dialogue. "
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Dialogue
Film
Without
" There is a profound and ineradicable taint of antisemitism in the British. "
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British
Profound
" When I started out I was a failed actor. "
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Failed
Out
Started
" 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. "
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Yourself
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Stage
" Our job, as writers is to do our jobs. "
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" Culture exists and evolves to relegate to habit categories of interactions the constant conscious reference to which would make human interaction impossible. "
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Human
Culture
Habit
" We Americans have always considered Hollywood, at best, a sinkhole of depraved venality. And, of course, it is. It is not a protective monastery of aesthetic truth. It is a place where everything is incredibly expensive. "
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Hollywood
Best
Aesthetic
" 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. "
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Look
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Political
" I don't think there's any information to be gotten from television. "
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Television
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Any
" Art and mass entertainment and propaganda, they can all be plotted on the same graph, but there is a difference. "
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Entertainment
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" I'm not the guy to ask about politics. I'm a gag writer. "
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" People may or may not say what they mean... but they always say something designed to get what they want. "
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Say
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Always
" 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. "
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" It's hard for a Jew of my generation, an American Jew, who is philo-Zionistic, not to romanticize Israel. "
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Israel
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" The liberals in my neighbourhood wouldn't give away Brentwood to the Palestinians, but they want to give away Tel Aviv. "
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" I don't really have a social life. "
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Social
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" I won't ever do e-mail. "
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Ever
E-Mail