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" 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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" 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. "

David Mamet

Say

Generation

Know

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

" 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. "

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

David Mamet

Everybody Else

Everybody

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

" 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. "

" Policemen so cherish their status as keepers of the peace and protectors of the public that they have occasionally been known to beat to death those citizens or groups who question that status. "

" 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. "

" 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.' "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I like Bach. I like Randy Newman. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I've been alienating my public since I was 20 years old. "

" I'm not an ascetic. "

David Mamet

Ascetic

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

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

" 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. "

" Every reiteration of the idea that nothing matters debases the human spirit. "

" 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. "

" Always tell the truth - it's the easiest thing to remember. "

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

" 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. "

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

" The quality I most admire in a man is steadfastness. "

" 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. "

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

David Mamet

Always

Fact

" I used to think I'd like to be a fireman - in fact, I still would - and the only drawback I could see was coming back to the firehouse, after a day of fighting fires, and still having to put in an eight-hour day writing. "