360 Quotes by David Mamet

When you come into the theatre, you have to be willing to say, ‘We’re all here to undergo a communion, to find out what the hell 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.

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

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.

You got an all-out prize fight, you wait ’til the fight’s over, one guy’s left standing and that’s how you know who’s won.

The man had been the head of the postwar European operation called Aliyah Bet, the clandestine resettlement of the Jewish remnant of the Holocaust in Palestine. He had come to this position as a senior member of the Palmach, the fighting arm of the Haganah, which was the underground Jewish Army in Palestine, under the British Mandate.

The mind is a mill which can incessant turn, ’til its mere operation focus the stress inward and the stones grind themselves to dust.

We all die in the end, but there’s no reason to die in the middle.

A novel it’s different. It’s kind of exhilarating not to have to cut to the bone constantly. Oh, well I can go over here for a moment. I can say what I think the guy was thinking or what the day looked like or what the bird was doing. If you do that as a playwright, you’re dead.

I look back on my liberal political beliefs with a sort of wonder – as another exercise in self-involvement – rewarding myself for some superiority I could not logically describe.