Quotes from David Mamet

It's hard to write a good play because it's hard to structure a plot. If you can think of it off the top of your head, so can the audience.

I'm entitled to my political opinions, and I get to vote because I'm an American.

Where in the wide history of the world do we find art created by the excessively wealthy, powerful, or educated?

Art and mass entertainment and propaganda, they can all be plotted on the same graph, but there is a difference.

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.

The Founders recognized that Government is quite literally a necessary evil, that there must be opposition, between its various branches, and between political parties, for these are the only ways to temper the individual's greed for power and the electorates' desires for peace by submission to coercion or blandishment.

The honest man might observe... that no one gets something for nothing; that politicians go in poor and go out rich; that the Government screws up everything it touches; and that the Will to Believe is best confined to the Religious Venue, as to practice it elsewhere is just too damned expensive.

Show business is and has always been a depraved carnival.

What is Big Government but the Executive's cocaine dream, an activity devoted solely to jockeying for position, in which he may find license for malversation, and may take the company treasury and direct it toward those people who will support his continued incumbency--it is within the law. Its street name is 'earmarks,' but it is theft.

In the meantime: (1) be direct; (2) remember that, being smarter than men, women respond to courtesy and kindness; (3) if you want to know what kind of a wife someone will make, observe her around her father and mother; (4) as to who gets out of the elevator first, I just can't help you.

We can only interpret the behavior of others through the screen we create.

How can I be secure? (Pause.) 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.

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.

Storytelling is like sex. We all do it naturally. Some of us are better at it than others.

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.

Writers are asked, 'How could you know so much about [fill in the profession]?' The answer, if the writing satisfies, is that one makes it up. And the job, my job, as a dramatist, was not to write accurately, but to write persuasively. If and when I do my job well, subsequent cowboys, as it were, will talk like me.

FAUSTUS. To have fooled the philosopher. MAGUS. One finds, in my profession, sir, the greater the intellect, the more ease in its misdirection. FAUSTUS. One finds the same in mine.

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.

My Alma mater is the Chicago Public Library.

Matrimony and monogamy have forever been linked with property and inheritance, the nuclear family, in the West, having been decided upon through trial and error as the most effective unit for preservation of both. In

And there are plays – and books and songs and poems and dances – that are perhaps upsetting or intricate or unusual, that leave you unsure, but which you think about perhaps the next day, and perhaps for a week, and perhaps for the rest of your life. Because they aren't clean, they aren't neat, but there's something in them that comes from the heart, and, so, goes to the heart.

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

The baby boomer generation, my own, is content, if of the Left, to live out our remaining years upon the work and upon the entitlements created by our parents, and to entail the costs upon our children--to tax industry out of the country, to tax wealth away from its historical role and use as the funder of innovation.

When you come into the theater, you have to be willing to say, We're all here to undergo a communion, to find out what is going on in this world. If you're not willing to say that, what you get is entertainment instead of art, and poor entertainment at that.