David Mamet

Old age and treachery will always beat youth and exuberance.

I understand that computers, which I once believed to be but a hermaphrodite typewriter-cum-filing cabinet, offer the cyber literate increased ability to communicate. I do not think this is altogether a bad thing, however it may appear on the surface.

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.

Every scene should be able to answer three questions: "Who wants what from whom? What happens if they don't get it? Why now?

My Alma mater is the Chicago Public Library.

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

...My dad, may he rest in peace, taught me many wonderful things. And one of the things he taught me was never ask a guy what you do for a living. He said "If you think about it, when you ask a guy, what do you do you do for a living," you__e saying "how may I gauge the rest of your utterances." are you smarter than I am? Are you richer than I am, poorer than I am?" So you ask a guy what do you do for a living, it__ the same thing as asking a guy, let me know what your politics are before I listen to you so I know whether or not you__e part of my herd, in which case I can nod knowingly, or part of the other herd, in which case I can wish you dead.

We live in oppressive times. We have, as a nation, become our own thought police; but instead of calling the process by which we limit our expression of dissent and wonder __ensorship,_ we call it __oncern for commercial viability.

Every reiteration of the idea that _nothing matters_ debases the human spirit.Every reiteration of the idea that there is no drama in modern life, there is only dramatization, that there is no tragedy, there is only unexplained misfortune, debases us. It denies what we know to be true. In denying what we know, we are as a nation which cannot remember its dreams--like an unhappy person who cannot remember his dreams and so denies that he does dream, and denies that there are such things as dreams.

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.

Life in the movie business is like the beginning of a new love affair: it's full of surprises, and you're constantly getting fucked.

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

You know, I once read an interesting book which said that, uh, most people lost in the wilds, they, they die of shame. Yeah, see, they die of shame. 'What did I do wrong? How could I have gotten myself into this?' And so they sit there and they... die. Because they didn't do the one thing that would save their lives. Thinking.

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

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

All drama is about lies. All drama is about something that__ hidden. A drama starts because a situation becomes imbalanced by a lie. The lie may be something we tell each other or something we think about ourselves, but the lie imbalances a situation. If you__e cheating on your wife the repression of that puts things out of balance; or if you__e someone you think you__e not, and you think you should be further ahead in your job, that neurotic vision takes over your life and you__e plagued by it until you__e cleansed. At the end of a play the lie is revealed. The better the play the more surprising and inevitable the lie is. Aristotle told us this