David Mamet Quotes

We're all put to the test... but it never comes in the form or at the point we would prefer, does it...

Put. That coffee. Down. Coffee's for closers only.

What is our life: (Pause.) it’s looking forward or it’s looking back. And that’s our life. That’s it...

The leaf of the camomile, parboiled in water, conduces to calm. And yet I do not worship it.

In the meantime: (1) be direct; (2) remember that, being smarter than men, women respond to courtesy...

Life in the movie business is like the beginning of a new love affair: it's full of surprises, and y...

Kraus asks the question of Freudian analysis: What would be enough? At what point would talking abou...

Society functions in a way much more interesting than the multiple-choice pattern we have been rewar...

One person may need (or want) more leisure, another more work; one more adventure, another more secu...

All drama is about lies. All drama is about something that’s hidden. A drama starts because a situat...

A play is basically a long, formalistic polemic. You can write it without the poetry, and if you do,...

We must have a pie. Stress cannot exist in the presence of a pie.

We live in oppressive times. We have, as a nation, become our own thought police; but instead of cal...

You can't write about history without writing about politics at some point. History is about movemen...

My Alma mater is the Chicago Public Library.

Conservatives believe in smaller government and in the power of the electorate. So I think that we'r...

I'm afraid of only two things: being lazy and being cowardly. I get up early in the morning and go t...

My dad was a labour lawyer, and the ideas that I grew up with - bad management, bad capitalism, robb...

My dad was an immigrant kid and a Democrat and a Jew, and we didn't know any Republicans in our grou...

When the three branches of government have failed to represent the citizenry and the mass of the med...

You know, I once read an interesting book which said that, uh, most people lost in the wilds, they, ...

War is tragedy. The great war stories are tragedies. It's the failure of diplomacy. 'War and Peace,'...

There's nothing in the world more silent than the telephone the morning after everybody pans your pl...

It's only words... unless they're true.

The poker player learns that sometimes both science and common sense are wrong; that the bumblebee c...

Every scene should be able to answer three questions: "Who wants what from whom? What happens if the...

Old age and treachery will always beat youth and exuberance.

...My dad, may he rest in peace, taught me many wonderful things. And one of the things he taught me...

Liberalism is a religion. Its tenets cannot be proved, its capacity for waste and destruction demons...

The basis of drama is ... is the struggle of the hero towards a specific goal at the end of which he...

If I could go back would I do it differently? Well, I can't go back.

Every reiteration of the idea that _nothing matters_ debases the human spirit.Every reiteration of t...

My greatest fear is that the audience will beat me to the punch line.

I understand that computers, which I once believed to be but a hermaphrodite typewriter-cum-filing c...