David Mamet
I hate vacations. There's nothing to do.
Films have degenerated to their original operation as carnival amusement - they offer not drama but thrills.
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.
We respond to a drama to that extent to which it corresponds to our dreamlife.
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.
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.
A good film script should be able to do completely without dialogue.
When I started out I was a failed actor.
When the three branches of government have failed to represent the citizenry and the mass of the media has failed to represent the citizenry, then the citizenry better represent the citizenry.
My idea of perfect happiness is a healthy family, peace between nations, and all the critics die.
In practice we, in the world, must do business with each other.
I know very well what it is to be out of work and to be cheated by employers and I know what it is to be an employer.
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.
I won't ever do e-mail.
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.
I don't really have a social life.
I've been alienating my public since I was 20 years old.
It's hard to write a good plot, it's very hard.
Culture exists and evolves to relegate to habit categories of interactions the constant conscious reference to which would make human interaction impossible.
There's something in me that just wants to create dialogue.
I've always been fascinated by the picaresque.
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.
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.
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.
I was fortunate enough to have a rambling youth.
The essence of jiu-jitsu is philosophy.
In Chicago, we love our crooks!
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.
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'm greedy and ambitious like everybody else.
When we leave the play saying how spectacular the sets or costumes were, or how interesting the ideas, it means we had a bad time.
I don't think there's any information to be gotten from television.
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.
The so-called assault weapons ban is a hoax. It is a political appeal to the ignorant. The guns it supposedly banned have been illegal for 78 years. Did the ban make them 'more' illegal? The ban addresses only the appearance of weapons, not their operation.
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.
The Founders recognized that Government is quite literally a necessary evil, that there must be opposition, between its various branches, and between political parties, for these are the only ways to temper the individual's greed for power and the electorates' desires for peace by submission to coercion or blandishment.
There's no such thing as talent; you just have to work hard enough.
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.
I didn't knowingly meet a conservative until, to my shame, I was 60 years old and sat down and said, 'Wow, I don't understand what this guy's talking about, but he has a great civility about him. Perhaps I better investigate this thing.'
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.
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.
The liberals in my neighbourhood wouldn't give away Brentwood to the Palestinians, but they want to give away Tel Aviv.
You get rich through luck. You get rich through crime. You get rich through fulfilling the needs of another. You can be as greedy as you like. If you can't do one of those three things, you ain't going to get any money.
Roll back the clock, and every possession of every great country started with a crime.
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.
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 like Bach. I like Randy Newman.
I hate the computer. I hate their spell-check. I won't ever do e-mail.
I'm afraid of only two things: being lazy and being cowardly. I get up early in the morning and go to work. I love to write.