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.
— David Mamet
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.
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.
Culture exists and evolves to relegate to habit categories of interactions the constant conscious reference to which would make human interaction impossible.
It's hard to write a good plot, it's very hard.
A liberal pretending to be a conservative? That's like a straight person pretending to be gay to get greater acceptance.
I'm afraid of only two things: being lazy and being cowardly.
I took the liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind.
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.
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.
It's upsetting to be a man in our society.
My greatest fear is that the audience will beat me to the punch line.
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.
Our job, as writers is to do our jobs.
Every reiteration of the idea that nothing matters debases the human spirit.
A good film script should be able to do completely without dialogue.
We respond to a drama to that extent to which it corresponds to our dreamlife.
I'm entitled to my political opinions, and I get to vote because I'm an American.
I've always been fascinated by the picaresque.
There's something in me that just wants to create dialogue.
There is a profound and ineradicable taint of antisemitism in the British.
I've been alienating my public since I was 20 years old.
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.
I won't ever do e-mail.
I love the British.
They say you can't study Kabbalah until you are at least 40 years old. You know why? You have to have experienced at least one generation making the same mistakes as the previous one.
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.
What I value most in my friends is loyalty.
My idea of perfect happiness is a healthy family, peace between nations, and all the critics die.
When I started out I was a failed actor.
I grew up in a tough neighborhood and we used to say you can get further with a kind word and a gun than just a kind word.
Always tell the truth - it's the easiest thing to remember.
Policemen so cherish their status as keepers of the peace and protectors of the public that they have occasionally been known to beat to death those citizens or groups who question that status.
In a world we find terrifying, we ratify that which doesn't threaten us.
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.
People only speak to get something.
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.
It's hard for a Jew of my generation, an American Jew, who is philo-Zionistic, not to romanticize Israel.
I don't really have a social life.
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.'
I'm not the guy to ask about politics. I'm a gag 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.
In practice we, in the world, must do business with each other.
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.
The quality I most admire in a man is steadfastness.
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.
I understand that computers, which I once believed to be but a hermaphrodite typewriter-cum-filing cabinet, offer the cyber literate increased ability to communicate. I do not think this is altogether a bad thing, however it may appear on the surface.
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.
People may or may not say what they mean... but they always say something designed to get what they want.
The product of the artist has become less important than the fact of the artist. We wish to absorb this person. We wish to devour someone who has experienced the tragic. In our society this person is much more important than anything he might create.
