David Mamet
Freud believed that our dreams sometimes recapitulate a speech, a comment we've heard or something that we've read. I always had compositions in my dreams. They would be a joke, a piece of a novel, a witticism or a piece of dialogue from a play, and I would dream them. I would actually express them line by line in the dream. Sometimes after waking up I would remember a snatch or two and write them down. There's something in me that just wants to create dialogue.Collection: Dream
How can I be secure? Through amassing wealth beyond all measure? No. And what's beyond measure? That's a sickness. That's a trap. There is no measure. Only greed.Collection: Greed
I pray you indulge me for a space, for I am going to set out on a speech which may have some duration, but whose theme may be gleaned from its opening phrase: how dare you.Collection: Space
You can't rely on the acting to tell the story.Collection: Acting
The images in a dream are vastly varied and magnificently interesting.Collection: Dream
It’s not a lie. It’s a gift for fiction.Collection: Lying
As you all know first prize is a Cadillac El Dorado. Anyone wanna see second prize? Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you're fired.Collection: Knives
IF YOU PRETEND THE CHARACTERS CANT SPEAK, AND WRITE A SILENT MOVIE, YOU WILL BE WRITING GREAT DRAMA.Collection: Drama
Any claim to actual identification as a drama must rest upon the construction of a plot independent of the assignment of affliction to the protagonist.Collection: Drama
The Oscars demonstrate the will of the people to control and judge those they have elected to stand above them (much, perhaps, as in bygone days, an election celebrated the same).Collection: People
It is to a dramatist, which is to say, to an unfrocked psychoanalyst, stunning that that which has sustained the Left in my generation, its avatar, its prime issue, has been abortion. For, whether or not it is regarded as a woman's right, an unfortunate necessity, or murder, which is to say, irrespective of differing and legitimate political views, to enshrine it as the most important test of the Liberal, is, mythologically, an assertion to the ultimate right of a postreligious Paganism.Collection: Views
Consider: for all the gobbledegook [film studio] executives spout about backstory, all that we, the audience, want to know is what happens next. That's the only thing that's going on. . . . Character is nothing other than action, and character-driven means The plot stinks, and you'd better hope the star is popular enough to open the movie in spite of it.Collection: Stars
All of us. All of us. We're doomed.Collection: Doomed
The pursuit of Fashion is the attempt of the middle class to co-opt tragedy. In adopting the clothing, speech, and personal habits of those in straitened, dangerous, or pitiful circumstances, the middle class seeks to have what it feels to be the exigent and nonequivocal experiences had by those it emulates.Collection: Fashion
You don't know what life is. You know nothing.Collection: Life Is
Make the audience wonder what's going on by putting them in the same position as the protagonist.Collection: Wonder
Always do things the least interesting way, the most blunt way, and you make a better movie. This is my experience.Collection: Interesting
Let the cut tell the story. Otherwise you have not got dramatic action, you've got narration.Collection: Cutting
What we're trying to do is find two or more shots the juxtaposition of which will give us the idea.Collection: Ideas
Many players will not improve because they cannot bear self-knowledge.Collection: Player
Blasphemy and prayer are one. Both assert the existence of a superior power. The first, however, with conviction.Collection: Prayer
Every reiteration of the idea that _nothing matters_ debases the human spirit. Every reiteration of the idea that there is no drama in modern life, there is only dramatization, that there is no tragedy, there is only unexplained misfortune, debases us. It denies what we know to be true. In denying what we know, we are as a nation which cannot remember its dreams--like an unhappy person who cannot remember his dreams and so denies that he does dream, and denies that there are such things as dreams.Collection: Dream
We all hope. It's what keeps us alive.Collection: Alive
If the scene bores you when you read it, rest assured it WILL bore the actors, and will then bore the audience, and we're all going to be back in the breadline.Collection: Bores You
The true writer must write not the acceptable but the true.Collection: Writing
As long as the protagonist wants something, the audience will want something.Collection: Want Something
The purpose of technique is to free the unconscious. If you follow the rules ploddingly, they will allow your unconscious to be free.Collection: Technique
Get into the scene late; get out of the scene early.Collection: Writing
Before you can steal fire from the Gods you gotta be able to get coffee for the director.Collection: Coffee
If you're neurotic and you think, I'm not where I deserve to be or my mother didn't love me, or blah, blah, blah, that lie, that neurotic vision, takes over your life and you're plagued by it 'til it's cleansed. In a play, at the end of the play, the lie is revealed. [T]he better the play is, the more surprising and inevitable the lie is, as Aristotle told us. Plays are about lies.Collection: Mother
The realization that I came to is that each citizen for himself or herself understands the economics, which is, "I better make more than I spend and I better put something aside for a rainy day, and I want to get a good idea about what to do with the surplus so that perhaps it can grow while I'm sleeping." And that that's capitalism. Everybody practices it, but half of the country - those on the left - deny that it's true.Collection: Country
A novel it's different. It's kind of exhilarating not to have to cut to the bone constantly. Oh, well I can go over here for a moment. I can say what I think the guy was thinking or what the day looked like or what the bird was doing. If you do that as a playwright, you're dead.Collection: Cutting
We recipients of the boon of liberty have always been ready, when faced with discomfort, to discard any and all first principles of liberty, and, further, to indict those who do not freely join with us in happily arrogating those principles.Collection: Government
The audience perceives only what the actor wants to do to the other actor.Collection: Actors
Art is about the spontaneous connection of the artist to his own unconscious - about insight beyond reason. If his insight were reasonable, anyone could do it, but anyone cannot. Only few can, and they are called.Collection: Art
The avant-garde is to the left what jingoism is to the right. Both are a refuge in nonsense.Collection: Jingoism