David Mamet

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

“I always thought the real violence in Hollywood isn't what's on the screen. It's what you have to do to raise the money.”

“My dad was an immigrant kid and a Democrat and a Jew, and we didn't know any Republicans in our group. So I grew up Democratic. My dad was a labor lawyer - a very hardworking guy, a one-horse labor lawyer - and then I went to hippie college and lived in the bubble.”

“President Obama seems to understand the Constitution as a 'set of suggestions.'”

“Art and mass entertainment and propaganda, they can all be plotted on the same graph, but there is a difference.”

“A liberal pretending to be a conservative? That's like a straight person pretending to be gay to get greater acceptance.”

“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.”

“We respond to a drama to that extent to which it corresponds to our dreamlife.”

“What is our life: (Pause.) it’s looking forward or it’s looking back. And that’s our life. That’s it. Where is the moment?”

“I'm entitled to my political opinions, and I get to vote because I'm an American.”

“Films have degenerated to their original operation as carnival amusement - they offer not drama but thrills.”

“The main question in drama, the way I was taught, is always, 'What does the protagonist want?' That's what drama is. It comes down to that. It's not about theme, it's not about ideas, it's not about setting, but what the protagonist wants.”

“The Founders recognized that Government is quite literally a necessary evil, that there must be opposition, between its various branches, and between political parties, for these are the only ways to temper the individual's greed for power and the electorates' desires for peace by submission to coercion or blandishment.”

“It's upsetting to be a man in our society.”

“You get rich through luck. You get rich through crime. You get rich through fulfilling the needs of another. You can be as greedy as you like. If you can't do one of those three things, you ain't going to get any money.”

“You can't write about history without writing about politics at some point. History is about movements of people. 'What is criminality and what is government' is a theme that runs through every history.”

“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.”

“People only speak to get something.”

“It is not the constitutional prerogative of the Government to determine needs.”

“Each culture has its own form of staged combat, evolved from its particular method of street fighting and cleaned up for presentation as a spectacle, e.g. savate, Cornish wrestling, karate, kung-fu.”