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" 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. "

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" 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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

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

" People only speak to get something. "

" The essence of jiu-jitsu is philosophy. "

David Mamet

Philosophy

Essence

" We respond to a drama to that extent to which it corresponds to our dreamlife. "

" It's hard to write a good plot, it's very hard. "

" I've always been fascinated by the picaresque. "

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

" 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. "

" You know, young actors say all the time, 'Should I use my own life experience?' And my response is, 'What choice do you have?' "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

David Mamet

Always

Fact

" It is not the constitutional prerogative of the Government to determine needs. "

" Writing a novel is an incredibly free experience. One puts one's self in a narrative mode. You can go off in any direction - the past, the future, or go laterally, or include one's own beliefs. It's total freedom. "

" There is a profound and ineradicable taint of antisemitism in the British. "

David Mamet

British

Profound

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

" My tendency as an actor was to correct people, was to say, 'What if we tried it this way, what about if we tried that way?' That's terrible habit for an actor, but that's a good habit for director. So I became a director. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I'm greedy and ambitious like everybody else. "

David Mamet

Everybody Else

Everybody

" 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. "

" My greatest fear is that the audience will beat me to the punch line. "