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
mean ideas play
When we leave the play saying how spectacular the sets or costumes were, or how interesting the ideas, it means we had a bad time.
symbolic-meaning perception tragedy
The popularity of disaster movies expresses a collective perception of a world threatened by irresistible and unforeseen forces which nevertheless are thwarted at the last moment. Their thinly veiled symbolic meaning might be translated thus: We are innocent of wrongdoing. We are attacked by unforeseeable forces come to harm us. We are, thus, innocent even of negligence. Though those forces are insuperable, chance will come to our aid and we shall emerge victorious.
stars character mean
Consider: for all the gobbledegook [film studio] executives spout about backstory, all that we, the audience, want to know is what happens next. That's the only thing that's going on. . . . Character is nothing other than action, and character-driven means The plot stinks, and you'd better hope the star is popular enough to open the movie in spite of it.
meaningful cutting get-better
A good writer gets better only by learning to cut, to remove the ornamental, the descriptive, the narrative, and especially the deeply felt and meaningful. What remains? The story remains.
truth honesty mean
People may or may not say what they mean... but they always say something designed to get what they want.
academic both common dreamt earth heaven learns player poker science trust
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.
active boon considered constant discard faced feature freely happily indict join liberty life principles recipients repetition
The proclamation and repetition of first principles is a constant feature of life in our democracy. Active adherence to these principles, however, has always been considered un-American. We recipients of the boon of liberty have always been ready, when faced with discomfort, to discard any and all first principles of liberty, and, further, to indict those who do not freely join with us in happily arrogating those principles.
fighting years lunch
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.
country sleep rainy-day
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.
home people guy
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.
way west slavery
Like Lincoln said: "If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong," and I feel the same way about the leftist dismantling of the West. If that's not wrong, then nothing is wrong.
past mind conscious
The conscious mind is going to suggest the obvious, the cliché, because these things have offered the security of having succeeded in the past.
purpose technique unconscious
The purpose of technique is to free the unconscious. If you follow the rules ploddingly, they will allow your unconscious to be free.
interesting way blunt
Always do things the least interesting way, the most blunt way, and you make a better movie. This is my experience.