David Mamet
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.
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 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.
Every scene should be able to answer three questions: "Who wants what from whom? What happens if they don't get it? Why now?"Collection: Three
Forget narrative, backstory, characterisation, exposition, all of that. Just make the audience want to know what happens next.Collection: Want
Opportunity may knock, but it seldom nags.Collection: Opportunity
We all die in the end, but there's no reason to die in the middle.Collection: Reason
It is the writer’s job to make the play interesting. It is the actor’s job to make the performance truthful.Collection: Jobs
Worry is interest paid in advance on a debt that never comes due.Collection: Worry
A good writer gets better only by learning to cut, to remove the ornamental, the descriptive, the narrative, and especially the deeply felt and meaningful. What remains? The story remains.Collection: Meaningful
When you come into the theatre, you have to be willing to say, 'We're all here to undergo a communion, to find out what the hell is going on in this world.' If you're not willing to say that, what you get is entertainment instead of art, and poor entertainment at that.Collection: Art
To find beauty in the sad, hope in the midst of loss, and dignity in failure is great poetic art.Collection: Art
Welcome to Chicago. This town stinks like a whorehouse at low tide.Collection: Law
Having spent too many years in show business, the one thing I see that succeeds is persistence. It's the person who just ain't gonna go home. I decided early on that I wasn't going to go home. This is what I'll be doing until they put me in jail or in a coffin.Collection: Home
Every fear hides a wish.Collection: Fear
The study of acting consists in the main of getting out of one’s own way, and in learning to deal with uncertainty and being comfortable being uncomfortable.Collection: Acting
The subject of drama is The Lie. At the end of the drama THE TRUTH -- which has been overlooked, disregarded, scorned, and denied -- prevails. And that is how we know the Drama is done.Collection: Drama
The audience requires not information but drama.Collection: Drama
Don't write stage directions. If it is not apparent what the character is trying to accomplish by saying the line, tell us how the character said it or whether or not she moved to the couch isn't going to aid the case.Collection: Writing
Being a writer in Hollywood is like going to Hitler's Eagle Nest with a great idea for a bar mitzvah.Collection: Eagles
The first amendment ensures not that speech will be fair, but that it will be free. It cannot be both.Collection: Speech
Encounter: Doubt, Shame, Humiliation. It will finally be worth it. Acting is more about courage than anything else.Collection: Doubt
The correct unit of study is not the play; it is the scene.Collection: Play
I don't have any experience with film schools. I suspect that they're useless, because I've had experience with drama schools, and have found them to be useless.Collection: Drama
In playwriting, you've got to be able to write dialogue. And if you write enough of it and let it flow enough, you'll probably come across something that will give you a key as to structure. I think the process of writing a play is working back and forth between the moment and the whole. The moment and the whole, the fluidity of the dialogue and the necessity of a strict construction. Letting one predominate for a while and coming back and fixing it so that eventually what you do, like a pastry chef, is frost your mistakes, if you can.Collection: Mistake
A man stands alone at the plate. This is the time for what? For individual achievement. There he stands alone. But in the field, what? Part of a team.Collection: Team
Put. That coffee. Down. Coffee's for closers only.Collection: Coffee
The popularity of disaster movies expresses a collective perception of a world threatened by irresistible and unforeseen forces which nevertheless are thwarted at the last moment. Their thinly veiled symbolic meaning might be translated thus: We are innocent of wrongdoing. We are attacked by unforeseeable forces come to harm us. We are, thus, innocent even of negligence. Though those forces are insuperable, chance will come to our aid and we shall emerge victorious.Collection: Symbolic Meaning
The terror and beauty of the dream come from the connection of previously unrelated mundanities of life.Collection: Dream
The pain of losing is diverting. So is the thrill of winning. Winning, however, is lonelier, as those you've won money from are not likely to commiserate with you. Winning takes getting used to.Collection: Pain
Hitchcock denigrated American films, saying they were all 'pictures of people talking' - as, indeed, most of them are.Collection: Talking
Film is a collaborative business: bend over.Collection: Film
In a restaurant one is both observed and unobserved. Joy and sorrow can be displayed and observed "unwittingly," the writer scowling naively and the diners wondering, What the hell is he doing?Collection: Joy
Cultivate a love of skill. Learn theatrical skills. They will give you continual pleasure, self-confidence, and link you to fifty thousand years of the history of our profession.Collection: Self Confidence
The great movie can be as free of being a record of the progress of the protagonist as is a dream.Collection: Dream
The secret knowledge is there's nobody home but us chickens. The Constitution was written by a bunch of regular guys who tried to get together and thrash out a contract under which they could get together that would keep people together.Collection: Home
I've been training in Jiu-jitsu for about six years and I'm very fortunate to live in that world. All the fighters hang out and have lunch together just about every day and trade stories. And I've always been fascinated how in the world of Jiu-jitsu in L.A. everybody in the fight world - cops, special forces, bouncers, stuntmen - connected across different lines.Collection: Fighting
"Based on a true story" is a come-on, the aesthetic equivalent of "no loan request refused." For, at best, the creator has fashioned a film based on his understanding of, interpretation of, and reduction of the report of an actual occurrence.Collection: Understanding
Almost all movie scripts contain material that cannot be filmed.Collection: Scripts
Don't assume I'm dumb because I wear a suit and tie.Collection: Ties
The dream and the film are the juxtaposition of images in order to answer a question.Collection: Dream
You got an all-out prize fight, you wait 'til the fight's over, one guy's left standing and that's how you know who's won.Collection: Fighting
Life in the movie business is like the beginning of a new love affair: it's full of surprises, and you're constantly getting f***ed.Collection: Surprise
For it is written that just as it is forbidden to partake of the forbidden, it is forbidden not to partake of the permitted.Collection: Forbidden
The work of the director is the work of constructing the shot list from the script.Collection: Directors
Anyone can write five people trapped in a snowstorm. The question is how you get them into the snowstorm. 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. To think of a plot that is, as Aristotle says, surprising and yet inevitable, is a lot, lot, lot of work.Collection: Writing
We respond to a drama to that extent to which it corresponds to our dream life.Collection: Dream
We cannot live in peace without Law. And though law cannot be perfect, it may be just if it is written in ignorance of the identity of the claimants and applied equally to all. Then it is a possession not only of the claimants but of the society, which may now base its actions upon a reasonable assumption of the law?s treatment.Collection: Ignorance
Show business is and has always been a depraved carnival.Collection: Carnivals