Quotes from David Mamet

It's called a confidence game. Why? Because you give me your confidence? No. Because I give you mine.

The basis of drama is ... is the struggle of the hero towards a specific goal at the end of which he realizes that what kept him from it was, in the lesser drama, civilization 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. The example Aristotle uses, of course, is Oedipus.

My motto is "Be Prepared." I am told this is also the motto of the Boy Scouts, but, if so, this only proves that they were acting according to my motto earlier than I.

Roll back the clock, and every possession of every great country started with a crime.

I'm afraid of only two things: being lazy and being cowardly.

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.

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.

It is not the constitutional prerogative of the Government to determine needs.

To find beauty in the sad, hope in the midst of loss, and dignity in failure is great poetic art.

You know, young actors say all the time, 'Should I use my own life experience?' And my response is, 'What choice do you have?'

American football seems to resemble soccer in that one scores by putting the ball through the opponent's goal; but football, truly is about land. The Settlers want to move the line of scrimmage Westward, the Native Americans want to move it East.

My tendency as an actor was to correct people, was to say, 'What if we tried it this way, what about if we tried that way?' That's terrible habit for an actor, but that's a good habit for director. So I became a director.

When I started out I was a failed actor.

There's nothing in the world more silent than the telephone the morning after everybody pans your play. It won't ring from room service; your mother won't be calling you. If the phone has not rung by 8 in the morning, you're dead.

It's upsetting to be a man in our society.

Liberalism is a religion. Its tenets cannot be proved, its capacity for waste and destruction demonstrated. But it affords a feeling of spiritual rectitude at little or no cost.

There is a profound and ineradicable taint of antisemitism in the British.

We Americans have always considered Hollywood, at best, a sinkhole of depraved venality. And, of course, it is. It is not a protective monastery of aesthetic truth. It is a place where everything is incredibly expensive.

I've always been fascinated by the picaresque.

I used to think I'd like to be a fireman - in fact, I still would - and the only drawback I could see was coming back to the firehouse, after a day of fighting fires, and still having to put in an eight-hour day writing.

The surprise is half the battle. Many things are half the battle, losing is half the battle. Let's think about what's the whole battle.

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.

We respond to a drama to that extent to which it corresponds to our dream life.

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