David Mamet

“I know very well what it is to be out of work and to be cheated by employers and I know what it is to be an employer.”

“I've always been more comfortable sinking while clutching a good theory than swimming with an ugly fact.”

“I love the British.”

“I don't think there's any information to be gotten from television.”

“There's no such thing as talent; you just have to work hard enough.”

“My dad was a labour lawyer, and the ideas that I grew up with - bad management, bad capitalism, robber barons - when I applied this to my own life, I saw that we are all on both sides of the coin.”

“The essence of jiu-jitsu is philosophy.”

“We Americans have always considered Hollywood, at best, a sinkhole of depraved venality. And, of course, it is. It is not a protective monastery of aesthetic truth. It is a place where everything is incredibly expensive.”

“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.”

“Being among my people is a delight. We Jews live among ourselves. I love it.”

“In Chicago, we love our crooks!”

“There's something in me that just wants to create dialogue.”

“I love working on a typewriter - the rhythm, the sound; it's like playing the piano, which I do, too.”

“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.'”

“The basis of drama is... the struggle of the hero towards a specific goal at the end of which he realises that what kept him from it was, in the lesser drama, civilisation and, in the great drama, the discovery of something that he did not set out to discover but which can be seen retrospectively as inevitable.”

“Our job, as writers is to do our jobs.”

“I've been alienating my public since I was 20 years old. When 'American Buffalo' came out on Broadway, people would storm out and say, 'How dare he use that kind of language!' Of course I'm alienating the public! That's what they pay me for.”

“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.”

“There's nothing in the world more silent than the telephone the morning after everybody pans your play. It won't ring from room service; your mother won't be calling you. If the phone has not rung by 8 in the morning, you're dead.”

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