David Mamet
David Mamet
David Alan Mametis an American playwright, essayist, screenwriter, and film director. As a playwright, Mamet has won a Pulitzer Prize and received Tony nominations for Glengarry Glen Rossand Speed-the-Plow. Mamet first gained acclaim for a trio of off-Broadway plays in 1976, The Duck Variations, Sexual Perversity in Chicago, and American Buffalo. His play Race opened on Broadway on December 6, 2009...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPlaywright
Date of Birth30 November 1947
CityChicago, IL
CountryUnited States of America
The audience perceives only what the actor wants to do to the other actor.
There's something in me that just wants to create dialogue.
My greatest fear is that the audience will beat me to the punch line.
Every fear hides a wish.
Old age and treachery will always beat youth and exuberance.
I love working on a typewriter - the rhythm, the sound; it's like playing the piano, which I do, too.
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.
I hate the computer. I hate their spell-check. I won't ever do e-mail.
There's no such thing as talent; you just have to work hard enough.
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.
The subject of drama is The Lie. At the end of the drama THE TRUTH -- which has been overlooked, disregarded, scorned, and denied -- prevails. And that is how we know the Drama is done.
We must have a pie. Stress cannot exist in the presence of a pie.
Forget narrative, backstory, characterisation, exposition, all of that. Just make the audience want to know what happens next.
Train yourself for a profession that does not exist.