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If You're Neurotic And You Think, I'm Not Where I Deserve To Be Or My Mother Didn't Love Me, Or Blah, Blah, Blah, That Lie, That Neurotic Vision, Takes Over Your Life And You're Plagued By It 'til It's Cleansed. In A Play, At The End Of The Play, The Lie Is Revealed. [t]he Better The Play Is, The More Surprising And Inevitable The Lie Is, As Aristotle Told Us. Plays Are About Lies.

-David Mamet

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If You're Neurotic And

David Mamet

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If You're Neurotic And You Think, I'm Not Where I Deserve To Be Or My Mother Didn't Love Me, Or Blah, Blah, Blah, That Lie, That Neurotic Vision, Takes Over Your Life And You're Plagued By It 'til It's Cleansed. In A Play, At The End Of The Play, The Lie Is Revealed. [t]he Better The Play Is, The More Surprising And Inevitable The Lie Is, As Aristotle Told Us. Plays Are About Lies.

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Get Into The Scene Late; Get Out Of The Scene Early.

People Only Speak To Get Something. If I Say, Let Me Tell You A Few Things About Myself, Already Your Defenses Go Up; You Go, Look, I Wonder What He Wants From Me, Because No One Ever Speaks Except To Obtain An Objective. That's The Only Reason Anyone Ever Opens Their Mouth, Onstage Or Offstage. They May Use A Language That Seems Revealing, But If So, It's Just Coincidence, Because What They're Trying To Do Is Accomplish An Objective.

The Audience Requires Not Information But Drama.

Welcome To Chicago. This Town Stinks Like A Whorehouse At Low Tide.

I Don't Think There's Any Information To Be Gotten From Television.

American Football Seems To Resemble Soccer In That One Scores By Putting The Ball Through The Opponent's Goal; But Football, Truly Is About Land. The Settlers Want To Move The Line Of Scrimmage Westward, The Native Americans Want To Move It East.

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President Obama Seems To Understand The Constitution As A 'set Of Suggestions.'

A Stage Play Is Basically A Form Of Uber-schizophrenia. You Split Yourself Into Two Minds - One Being The Protagonist And The Other Being The Antagonist. The Playwright Also Splits Himself Into Two Other Minds: The Mind Of The Writer And The Mind Of The Audience.

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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.

The Government, For Example, Has Determined That Black People (somehow) Have Fewer Abilities Than White People, And, So, Must Be Given Certain Preferences. Anyone Acquainted With Both Black And White People Knows This Assessment Is Not Only Absurd But Monstrous. And Yet It Is The Law.

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My Alma Mater Is The Chicago Public Library. I Got What Little Educational Foundation I Got In The Third-floor Reading Room, Under The Tutelage Of A Coca-cola Sign.

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.

War Is Tragedy. The Great War Stories Are Tragedies. It's The Failure Of Diplomacy. 'war And Peace,' 'a Farewell To Arms,' 'for Whom The Bell Tolls.' Those Are Some Of The Greatest Tragedies.

Anyone Can Write Five People Trapped In A Snowstorm. The Question Is How You Get Them Into The Snowstorm. It's Hard To Write A Good Play Because It's Hard To Structure A Plot. If You Can Think Of It Off The Top Of Your Head, So Can The Audience. To Think Of A Plot That Is, As Aristotle Says, Surprising And Yet Inevitable, Is A Lot, Lot, Lot Of Work.

I'm Afraid Of Only Two Things: Being Lazy And Being Cowardly.

The Audience Will Teach You How To Act And The Audience Will Teach You How To Write And To Direct. The Classroom Will Teach You How To Obey, And Obedience In The Theatre Will Get You Nowhere. It’s A Soothing Falsity.

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There Is No Such Thing As Character Other Than The Habitual Action, As Mr. Aristotle Told Us Two Thousand Years Ago.

Art Is An Expression Of Joy And Awe. It Is Not An Attempt To Share One's Virtues And Accomplishments With The Audience, But An Act Of Selfless Spirit.

It's Only Words... Unless They're True.

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There's Something In Me That Just Wants To Create Dialogue.

When I Started Out I Was A Failed Actor.

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It Is The Objective Of The Protagonist That Keeps Us In Our Seats.

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It Is The Writer’s Job To Make The Play Interesting. It Is The Actor’s Job To Make The Performance Truthful.

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The Greater The Intellect, The More Ease In Its Misdirection.

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If You Can't Tell It To Me In One Sentence, They Can't Put It In Tv Guide.

The Conscious Mind Is Going To Suggest The Obvious, The Cliché, Because These Things Have Offered The Security Of Having Succeeded In The Past.

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Being Among My People Is A Delight. We Jews Live Among Ourselves. I Love It.

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Mixed Martial Arts Was Invented By Brazilians, Whose Families Had Been Trained By The Japanese. Those Brazilians Came To The U.s., Where Their Invention Was Bought Out, Gussied Up And Presented To The World, Which Found It Good.

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Show Business Is And Has Always Been A Depraved Carnival.

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It's Upsetting To Be A Man In Our Society.

People May Or May Not Say What They Mean... But They Always Say Something Designed To Get What They Want.

All Fears Are One Fear. Just The Fear Of Death. And We Accept It, Then We Are At Peace.

I Won't Ever Do E-mail.

You Wanna Know How To Get Capone? They Pull A Knife, You Pull A Gun. He Sends One Of Yours To The Hospital, You Send One Of His To The Morgue. That's The Chicago Way! And That's How You Get Capone.

Listen, Here's The Thing About An English Degree - If You Sat Somebody Down And Asked Them To Make A List Of The Writers They Admire Over The Last Hundred Years, See How Many Of Them Got A Degree In English.

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 Pursuit Of Fashion Is The Attempt Of The Middle Class To Co-opt Tragedy. In Adopting The Clothing, Speech, And Personal Habits Of Those In Straitened, Dangerous, Or Pitiful Circumstances, The Middle Class Seeks To Have What It Feels To Be The Exigent And Nonequivocal Experiences Had By Those It Emulates.

The Liberals In My Neighbourhood Wouldn't Give Away Brentwood To The Palestinians, But They Want To Give Away Tel Aviv.

The Israelis Would Like To Live In Peace Within Their Borders; The Arabs Would Like To Kill Them All.

I Don't Have Any Experience With Film Schools. I Suspect That They're Useless, Because I've Had Experience With Drama Schools, And Have Found Them To Be Useless.

All Of Us. All Of Us. We're Doomed.

Characters On Stage, Like People In What We Refer To As "real Life," Do Not Speak To Reveal Themselves. They Do Not Speak To Conceal Themselves. They Speak To Get Whatever It Is That They Want. It Is The Only Reason They Speak.

The Oscars Demonstrate The Will Of The People To Control And Judge Those They Have Elected To Stand Above Them (much, Perhaps, As In Bygone Days, An Election Celebrated The Same).

I'm Greedy And Ambitious Like Everybody Else.

My Tendency As An Actor Was To Correct People, Was To Say, 'what If We Tried It This Way, What About If We Tried That Way?' That's Terrible Habit For An Actor, But That's A Good Habit For Director. So I Became A Director.

Every Reiteration Of The Idea That _nothing Matters_ Debases The Human Spirit. Every Reiteration Of The Idea That There Is No Drama In Modern Life, There Is Only Dramatization, That There Is No Tragedy, There Is Only Unexplained Misfortune, Debases Us. It Denies What We Know To Be True. In Denying What We Know, We Are As A Nation Which Cannot Remember Its Dreams--like An Unhappy Person Who Cannot Remember His Dreams And So Denies That He Does Dream, And Denies That There Are Such Things As Dreams.

If You're Writing An Opinion Piece, It's Your Job To Write Your Opinion. If, On The Other Hand, You Wrote A Novel, As Virginia Woolf Tells Us, It Would Be Inappropriate If You Let Your Novel Be Influenced By Your Political Opinions.

Political Opinions

I've Been Alienating My Public Since I Was 20 Years Old.

Life In The Movie Business Is Like The Beginning Of A New Love Affair: It's Full Of Surprises, And You're Constantly Getting F***ed.

Our Job, As Writers Is To Do Our Jobs.

Obama Is A Tyrant The Same Way Fdr Was A Tyrant. He Has A View Of Presidential Power That States: The Government Is In Control Of The Country, And The President Is In Charge Of The Government. He's Taken An Imperial View Of The Presidency.

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.

No One Enjoys Being Equal.

The So-called Assault Weapons Ban Is A Hoax. It Is A Political Appeal To The Ignorant. The Guns It Supposedly Banned Have Been Illegal For 78 Years. Did The Ban Make Them 'more' Illegal? The Ban Addresses Only The Appearance Of Weapons, Not Their Operation.

Assault Weapons

If You Find That A Point Cannot Be Made Without Narration, It Is Virtually Certain That The Point Is Unimportant To The Story (which Is To Say, To The Audience).

I Hate Vacations. There's Nothing To Do.

The Honest Man Might Observe... That No One Gets Something For Nothing; That Politicians Go In Poor And Go Out Rich; That The Government Screws Up Everything It Touches; And That The Will To Believe Is Best Confined To The Religious Venue, As To Practice It Elsewhere Is Just Too Damned Expensive.

A Man Stands Alone At The Plate. This Is The Time For What? For Individual Achievement. There He Stands Alone. But In The Field, What? Part Of A Team.

I Pray You Indulge Me For A Space, For I Am Going To Set Out On A Speech Which May Have Some Duration, But Whose Theme May Be Gleaned From Its Opening Phrase: How Dare You.

All Rhetorical Questions Are Accusations.

Rhetorical Question

We All Hope. It's What Keeps Us Alive.

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Forget Narrative, Backstory, Characterisation, Exposition, All Of That. Just Make The Audience Want To Know What Happens Next.

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When The Three Branches Of Government Have Failed To Represent The Citizenry And The Mass Of The Media Has Failed To Represent The Citizenry, Then The Citizenry Better Represent The Citizenry.

One Person May Need (or Want) More Leisure, Another More Work; One More Adventure, Another More Security, And So On. It Is This Diversity That Makes A Country, Indeed A State, A City, A Church, Or A Family, Healthy. 'one-size-fits-all,' And That Size Determined By The State Has A Name, And That Name Is 'slavery.'

The True Writer Must Write Not The Acceptable But The True.

Let The Cut Tell The Story. Otherwise You Have Not Got Dramatic Action, You've Got Narration.

I Love Superman. I'm A Big Fan Of Anyone Who Can Make His Living In His Underwear.

A Liberal Pretending To Be A Conservative? That's Like A Straight Person Pretending To Be Gay To Get Greater Acceptance.

People Ask Me, 'what Do You Do?' And I Tell Them I'm A Writer, But Always With The Silent Reservation, 'i Am, Of Course, Not Really A Writer. Hemingway Was A Writer.'

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.

The Correct Unit Of Study Is Not The Play; It Is The Scene.

I Was Fortunate Enough To Have A Rambling Youth.

What I Value Most In My Friends Is Loyalty.

The Quality I Most Admire In A Man Is Steadfastness.

The Avant-garde Is To The Left What Jingoism Is To The Right. Both Are A Refuge In Nonsense.

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.

Symbolic Meaning

Movies Were Never An Art Form, They Were Entertainment. It Just Evolved Into An Art Form From There, And It's Still Evolving In Different Ways.

A Play Is Basically A Long, Formalistic Polemic. You Can Write It Without The Poetry, And If You Do, You May Have A Pretty Good Play. We Know This Because We See Plays In Translation. Not Many People Speak Norwegian Or Danish Or Whatever Guys Like Ibsen Spoke, Or Russian - Yet We Understand Chekhov And The Others.

Where In The Wide History Of The World Do We Find Art Created By The Excessively Wealthy, Powerful, Or Educated?

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