David Mamet Quotes & Sayings (Page 5)

“Culture exists and evolves to relegate to habit categories of interactions the constant conscious reference to which would make human interaction impossible.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Liberalism is a religion. Its tenets cannot be proved, its capacity for waste and destruction demonstrated. But it affords a feeling of spiritual rectitude at little or no cost.”

“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.”

“I hate the computer. I hate their spell-check. I won't ever do e-mail.”

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

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

“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.”

“The surprise is half the battle. Many things are half the battle, losing is half the battle. Let's think about what's the whole battle.”