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" I've always been fascinated by the picaresque. "
David Mamet
Fascinated
Been
Always
Related Quotes:
" I love the British. "
David Mamet
Love
I Love
British
" 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
" In my family, in the days prior to television, we liked to while away the evenings by making ourselves miserable, solely based on our ability to speak the language viciously. "
David Mamet
Language
Television
Family
" Every reiteration of the idea that nothing matters debases the human spirit. "
David Mamet
Spirit
Matters
Nothing
" When I started out I was a failed actor. "
David Mamet
Failed
Out
Started
" I don't really have a social life. "
David Mamet
Social
Really
Life
" 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
" 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. "
David Mamet
Head
Audience
Play
" 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
" I love working on a typewriter - the rhythm, the sound; it's like playing the piano, which I do, too. "
David Mamet
Sound
Love
Too
" 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
" 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
" My greatest fear is that the audience will beat me to the punch line. "
David Mamet
Punch
Line
Fear
" I hate vacations. There's nothing to do. "
David Mamet
Vacations
Hate
Nothing
" It's hard to write a good plot, it's very hard. "
David Mamet
Very
Hard
Good
" 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
" 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 don't think there's any information to be gotten from television. "
David Mamet
Television
Information
Any
" Old age and treachery will always beat youth and exuberance. "
David Mamet
Old
Always
Age
" There's something in me that just wants to create dialogue. "
David Mamet
Something
Me
Dialogue
" 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
" I hate the computer. I hate their spell-check. I won't ever do e-mail. "
David Mamet
E-Mail
Hate
Ever
" 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. "
David Mamet
You
Say
Neighborhood
" Obama is a tyrant the same way FDR was a tyrant. He has a view of presidential power that states: the government is in control of the country, and the president is in charge of the government. He's taken an imperial view of the presidency. "
David Mamet
Power
View
Way
" The essence of jiu-jitsu is philosophy. "
David Mamet
Philosophy
Essence
" 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. "
David Mamet
Goal
Football
American
" People ask me, 'What do you do?' And I tell them I'm a writer, but always with the silent reservation, 'I am, of course, not really a writer. Hemingway was a writer.' "
David Mamet
You
Always
People
" 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
" 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
" It's only words... unless they're true. "
David Mamet
Words
Only
True