David Mamet

What is our life: (Pause.) it__ looking forward or it__ looking back. And that__ our life. That__ it. Where is the moment?

Kraus asks the question of Freudian analysis: What would be enough? At what point would talking about one__ problems for x hours a week, be sufficient to bring one to a state of __ormalcy_?The genius of Freudianism, Kraus writes, is not the creation of a cure, but of a disease__he universal, if intermittent, human sentiment that __omething is not right,_ elaborated into a state whose parameters, definitions, and prescriptions are controlled by a self-selecting group of __xperts,_ who can never be proved wrong.It was said that the genius of the Listerine campaign was attributable to the creation not of mouthwash, but of halitosis. Kraus indicts Freud for the creation of the nondisease of dissatisfaction. (See also the famous __alaise_ of Jimmy Carter, which, like Oscar Wilde__ Pea Soup Fogs, didn__ exist __il someone began describing it.) To consider a general dissatisfaction with one__ life, or with life in general as a political rather than a personal, moral problem, is to exercise or invite manipulation. The fortune teller, the __ife coach,_ the Spiritual Advisor, these earn their living from applying nonspecific, nonspecifiable __emedies_ to nonspecifiable discomforts.The sufferers of such, in medicine, are called __he worried well,_ and provide the bulk of income and consume the bulk of time of most physicians. It was the genius of the Obama campaign to exploit them politically. The antecedent of his campaign has been called Roosevelt__ New Deal, but it could, more accurately, be identified as The Music Man.

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

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

Society functions in a way much more interesting than the multiple-choice pattern we have been rewarded for succeeding at in school. Success in life comes not from the ability to choose between the four presented answers, but from the rather more difficult and painfully acquired ability to formulate the questions.

My dad was a labour lawyer, and the ideas that I grew up with - bad management, bad capitalism, robber barons - when I applied this to my own life, I saw that we are all on both sides of the coin.

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.

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.

When the three branches of government have failed to represent the citizenry and the mass of the media has failed to represent the citizenry, then the citizenry better represent the citizenry.

Conservatives believe in smaller government and in the power of the electorate. So I think that we're less likely to try to use a dramatic forum to warp people's political views.

You can't write about history without writing about politics at some point. History is about movements of people. 'What is criminality and what is government' is a theme that runs through every history.

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.

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

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.

One person may need (or want) more leisure, another more work; one more adventure, another more security, and so on. It is this diversity that makes a country, indeed a state, a city, a church, or a family, healthy. 'One-size-fits-all,' and that size determined by the State has a name, and that name is 'slavery.'

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.

I'm afraid of only two things: being lazy and being cowardly. I get up early in the morning and go to work. I love to write.