David Mamet
Where in the wide history of the world do we find art created by the excessively wealthy, powerful, or educated?Collection: Art
It is the objective of the protagonist that keeps us in our seats.Collection: Protagonists
Fun is what you do for yourself. If somebody else does it, it's entertainment.Collection: Fun
You wanna know how to get Capone? They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That's the Chicago way! And that's how you get Capone.Collection: Gun
You know, I once read an interesting book which said that, uh, most people lost in the wilds, they, they die of shame. Yeah, see, they die of shame. 'What did I do wrong? How could I have gotten myself into this?' And so they sit there and they... die. Because they didn't do the one thing that would save their lives. Thinking.Collection: Book
There is no such thing as character other than the habitual action, as Mr. Aristotle told us two thousand years ago.Collection: Character
They say the definition of ambivalence is watching your mother-in-law drive over a cliff in your new Cadillac.Collection: Mother
Everybody makes their own fun. If you don't make it yourself, it isn't fun. It's entertainment.Collection: Fun
A dramatic experience concerned with the mundane may inform but it cannot release; and one concerned essentially with the aesthetic politics of its creators may divert or anger, but it cannot enlighten.Collection: Theatre
The audience will teach you how to act and the audience will teach you how to write and to direct. The classroom will teach you how to obey, and obedience in the theatre will get you nowhere. It’s a soothing falsity.Collection: Writing
All rhetorical questions are accusations.Collection: Accusation
All fears are one fear. Just the fear of death. And we accept it, then we are at peace.Collection: Fear Of Death
We're all put to the test... but it never comes in the form or at the point we would prefer, does it?Collection: Doe
They have a desire to put on plays and to fulfill that traditional role of a theater in a community: to be the place where people go to hear the truth.Collection: People
People only speak to get something. If I say, Let me tell you a few things about myself, already your defenses go up; you go, Look, I wonder what he wants from me, because no one ever speaks except to obtain an objective. That's the only reason anyone ever opens their mouth, onstage or offstage. They may use a language that seems revealing, but if so, it's just coincidence, because what they're trying to do is accomplish an objective.Collection: People
We cannot live without trade. A society can neither advance nor improve without excess of disposable income. This excess can only be amassed through the production of goods and services necessary or attractive to the mass. A financial system which allows this leads to inequality; one that does not leads to mass starvation.Collection: Excess
Anyone ever lost in the wild knows that nature wants you dead.Collection: Humor
Train yourself for a profession that does not exist.Collection: Doe
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.Collection: Luck
We must have a pie. Stress cannot exist in the presence of a pie.Collection: Stress
Art is an expression of joy and awe. It is not an attempt to share one's virtues and accomplishments with the audience, but an act of selfless spirit.Collection: Art
The greater the intellect, the more ease in its misdirection.Collection: Ease
Luck, if there is such a thing, is either going to favor everyone equally or going to exhibit a preference for the prepared.Collection: Luck
Like Lincoln said: "If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong," and I feel the same way about the leftist dismantling of the West. If that's not wrong, then nothing is wrong.Collection: Slavery
Society functions in a way much more interesting than the multiple-choice pattern we have been rewarded for succeeding at in school. Success in life comes not from the ability to choose between the four presented answers, but from the rather more difficult and painfully acquired ability to formulate the questions.Collection: School
I examined my Liberalism and found it like an addiction to roulette. Here, though the odds are plain, and the certainty of loss apparent to anyone with a knowledge of arithmetic, the addict, failing time and again, is convinced he yet is graced with the power to contravene natural laws. The roulette addict, when he invariably comes to grief, does not examine either the nature of roulette, or of his delusion, but retires to develop a new system, and to scheme for more funds.Collection: Grief
Characters on stage, like people in what we refer to as "real life," do not speak to reveal themselves. They do not speak to conceal themselves. They speak to get whatever it is that they want. It is the only reason they speak.Collection: Real
No one enjoys being equal.Collection: Equality
The most charming of theories holds that someone other than Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare's plays -- that he was of too low a state, and of insufficient education. But where in the wide history of the world do we find art created by the excessively wealthy, powerful, or educated?Collection: Art
The conscious mind is going to suggest the obvious, the cliché, because these things have offered the security of having succeeded in the past.Collection: Past
The job of the artist, is to say, wait a second, everything that we have thought is wrong. Let's re-examine it.Collection: Jobs
We live in oppressive times. We have, as a nation, become our own thought police; but instead of calling the process by which we limit our expression of dissent and wonder ‘censorship,’ we call it ‘concern for commercial viability.Collection: Freedom
I love Superman. I'm a big fan of anyone who can make his living in his underwear.Collection: Fans
My alma mater is the Chicago Public Library.Collection: Library
At the Neighborhood Playhouse School of Theatre, Sanford Meisner said, 'When you go into the professional world, at a stock theatre somewhere, backstage, you will meet an older actor, someone who has been around awhile. He will tell you tales and anecdotes, about life in the theatre. He will speak to you about your performance and the performances of others, and he will generalize to you, based on his experience and his intuitions, about the laws of the stage. Ignore this man!'Collection: School
Any time two characters are talking about a third, the scene is a crock of s***.Collection: Writing
Invent nothing, deny nothing, speak up, stand up, stay out of school.Collection: School
Acting is not a genteel profession. Actors used to be buried at a crossroads with a stake through the heart. Those people's performances so troubled the onlookers that they feared their ghosts. An awesome compliment. Those players moved the audience not such that they were admitted to a school, or received a complimentary review, but such that the audience feared for their soul. Now that seems to me something to aim for.Collection: School
When we fear things I think that we wish for them ... every fear hides a wishCollection: Fear
Do not internalize the industrial model. You are not one of the myriad interchangeable pieces, but a unique human being, and if you've got something to say, say it, and think well of yourself while you're learning to say it better.Collection: Thinking
Everyone needs money. That's why they call it moneyCollection: Needs
If You can't tell it to me in one sentence, they can't put it in TV Guide.Collection: Tvs
If you find that a point cannot be made without narration, it is virtually certain that the point is unimportant to the story (which is to say, to the audience).Collection: Stories
I tend to write a lot, which I think is the secret to being prolific.Collection: Writing
The mind is a mill which can incessant turn, 'til its mere operation focus the stress inward and the stones grind themselves to dust.Collection: Stress
My alma mater is the Chicago Public Library. I got what little educational foundation I got in the third-floor reading room, under the tutelage of a Coca-Cola sign.Collection: Educational
Storytelling is like sex. We all do it naturally. Some of us are better at it than others.Collection: Sex
I go out there. I'm out there every day. [Pause] There is nothing out there.Collection: Pauses
Here is a sovereign talisman against regret: never do that which might engender it.Collection: Regret