360 Quotes by David Mamet

Let the cut tell the story. Otherwise you have not got dramatic action, you've got narration.

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.

You can't rely on the acting to tell the story.

I've been training in Jiu-jitsu for about six years and I'm very fortunate to live in that world. All the fighters hang out and have lunch together just about every day and trade stories. And I've always been fascinated how in the world of Jiu-jitsu in L.A. everybody in the fight world - cops, special forces, bouncers, stuntmen - connected across different lines.

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.

The realization that I came to is that each citizen for himself or herself understands the economics, which is, "I better make more than I spend and I better put something aside for a rainy day, and I want to get a good idea about what to do with the surplus so that perhaps it can grow while I'm sleeping." And that that's capitalism. Everybody practices it, but half of the country - those on the left - deny that it's true.

The essence of jiu-jitsu is philosophy.

Culture exists and evolves to relegate to habit categories of interactions the constant conscious reference to which would make human interaction impossible.

The secret knowledge is there's nobody home but us chickens. The Constitution was written by a bunch of regular guys who tried to get together and thrash out a contract under which they could get together that would keep people together.