David Mamet

It's only words... unless they're true.

"Every scene should be able to answer three questions: "Who wants what from whom? What happens if they don't get it? Why now?

How was her crumbcake?
oh.. from the store...
.......

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether this nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long survive. (A. Lincoln.) But we are not met upon a battlefield of that war. The battlefield for the culture is, of course,

We must have a pie. Stress cannot exist in the presence of a pie.

Writers are asked, 'How could you know so much about [fill in the profession]?' The answer, if the writing satisfies, is that one makes it up. And the job, my job, as a dramatist, was not to write accurately, but to write persuasively. If and when I do my job well, subsequent cowboys, as it were, will talk like me.

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.

in this great land, found his crouched, finger-pointing yentism merely the performance of a deeper truth and moral imperative, reducible to “stop working, tax the productive until they stop working, and let the country go to hell.

The power of the dramatist, and of the political flack therefore, resides in the ability to state the problem.

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

The whole entire world.
There is no law.
There is no right and wrong.
The world is lies.
There is no friendship.
Every fucking thing.
Every God-forsaken thing.

Fox: It's lonely at the top.
Gould: But it ain't crowded.

We were taught in the sixties to award ourselves merit for membership in a superior group — irrespective of our group’s accomplishments. We continue to do so, irrespective of accomplishments, individual or communal, having told each other we were special. We learned that all one need do is refrain from trusting anybody over thirty — we were the culmination of history, superior to all those misguided who had come before, which is to say all humanity.

In the meantime: (1) be direct; (2) remember that, being smarter than men, women respond to courtesy and kindness; (3) if you want to know what kind of a wife someone will make, observe her around her father and mother; (4) as to who gets out of the elevator first, I just can't help you.

the Great Actor, capable of bringing herself to tears, may extort our admiration for her “accomplishment,” but she will never leave us stronger; she has made us pay a price, and made us pretend we like it, but we leave the theatre moved only by our capacity to be moved.