David Mamet Quotes

Stanislavsky wrote that the last ninety seconds are the most important in the play. Hollywood wisdom casts it thus: Turn the thing around in the last two minutes, and you can live quite nicely. Turn it around again in the last ten seconds and you can buy a house in Bel Air.

There exists in some stars not only a belligerence but also a litigious bent. I have seen a man take a tape measure to his trailer, as he suspected that it was not quite perfectly equal (as per his contract) in length to that of his fellow player.

We Americans don't do irony very well. We are a straightforward and self-righteous people, so we are rather good at viciousness and humor but lacking in irony.

A director cannot deal in fantasy. His job is to take the delineation of a fantasy and transform it into film. He has a certain amount of time and money, and no amount of fantasy will stop the sun going down on a day on which he has not completed his assigned filming.

A writer’s life is lived, and must be lived, in solitude. For it's a dialogue with one’s thoughts, and a dialogue about one’s thoughts; and the corrosive nature of this struggle is often unpleasant, devouring one’s time and weakening one’s capacity for simple human interaction.

We conceive the world not through indoctrination, but through osmosis: a culture is the amalgam and the sum of the unwritten laws.

Do bumper stickers save whales, and free Tibet? By what magical process?

The spiritualist and the politician are essentially magicians, one offering diversion, the other security, in exchange for a suspension of common sense.

You might say it is absurd to claim to determine a person’s deserts on the basis of the shape of his head. It is equally absurd to make the claim on the basis of the color of his skin.

Our lives today seem more stratified by wealth than race. This is a shame, for one needs more energy to relax sequestered by wealth, than protected in simple settings by one’s clan; for wealth certainly has degrees, and so these differences may create envy and anxiety.

Actors, thriving on publicity, claim the right to champion “causes”. The nature and profession of the actor is to see himself as the Hero. Without this, the actor cannot act. This indulgence is a boon to the community, its elaboration into do-gooderism is, perhaps, inevitable.

The worker on the assembly line, on the movie set, and you and I have the same reaction when the Bureaucrats come slumming by: “If the goddamn Suits would finish their tour, stop nodding wisely, and go away, perhaps I might be able to get the job done.”

Never feel sorry for a man who owns a plane.

My father opined that to conserve good feelings, one should express a negative concept in a positive form.

Just as the true actor loves to act, the true carpenter or seamstress loves that perfect corner.

Life in the movie business is like the beginning of a new love affair: it's full of surprises & you're constantly getting fucked.

Show business is and has always been a depraved carnival.

People may or may not say what they mean but they always say something designed to get what they want.