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. – David Mamet
I love working on a typewriter – the rhythm, the sound; it’s like playing the piano, which I do, too. – David Mamet
A stage play is basically a form of uber-schizophrenia. You split yourself into two minds – one being the protagonist and the other being the antagonist. The playwright also splits himself into two other minds: the mind of the writer and the mind of the audience. – David Mamet
Mixed martial arts was invented by Brazilians, whose families had been trained by the Japanese. Those Brazilians came to the U.S., where their invention was bought out, gussied up and presented to the world, which found it good. – David Mamet
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. – David Mamet
My dad was an immigrant kid and a Democrat and a Jew, and we didn’t know any Republicans in our group. So I grew up Democratic. My dad was a labor lawyer – a very hardworking guy, a one-horse labor lawyer – and then I went to hippie college and lived in the bubble. – David Mamet
A play is basically a long, formalistic polemic. You can write it without the poetry, and if you do, you may have a pretty good play. We know this because we see plays in translation. Not many people speak Norwegian or Danish or whatever guys like Ibsen spoke, or Russian – yet we understand Chekhov and the others. – David Mamet
The liberals in my neighbourhood wouldn’t give away Brentwood to the Palestinians, but they want to give away Tel Aviv. – David Mamet
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. – David Mamet
War is tragedy. The great war stories are tragedies. It’s the failure of diplomacy. ‘War and Peace,’ ‘A Farewell to Arms,’ ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls.’ Those are some of the greatest tragedies. – David Mamet
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. – David Mamet
I’ve been alienating my public since I was 20 years old. When ‘American Buffalo’ came out on Broadway, people would storm out and say, ‘How dare he use that kind of language!’ Of course I’m alienating the public! That’s what they pay me for. – David Mamet
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. – David Mamet
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. – David Mamet
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. – David Mamet
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. – David Mamet
People may or may not say what they mean… but they always say something designed to get what they want. – David Mamet
Culture exists and evolves to relegate to habit categories of interactions the constant conscious reference to which would make human interaction impossible. – David Mamet
I look back on 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. – David Mamet
The main question in drama, the way I was taught, is always, ‘What does the protagonist want?’ That’s what drama is. It comes down to that. It’s not about theme, it’s not about ideas, it’s not about setting, but what the protagonist wants. – David Mamet