David Mamet Quotes

All of us write plays in our heads all the time…before we’re going to visit our girl friend, before we’re going to talk to a boss—we rehearse.

Film is the least realistic of art forms.

The Film Industry is the American Monarchy: it is strict entailed succession and Horatio Alger in one. Except for the money manipulators and speculators on the top, it is a society built on work, achievement, and fealty to those in power.

The problems of the world, AIDS, cancer, nuclear war, pollution, are, finally, no more solvable than the problems of a tree which has borne fruit: the apples are overripe and they are falling—what can be done?…  What can be done about the problems which beset our life? Nothing can be done, and nothing needs to be done. Something is being done—the organism is preparing to rest.

All plays are about decay… That is why the theater has always been essential to human psychic equilibrium.

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.