David Mamet Quotes

"When you come into the theater, you have to be willing to say, "We're all here to undergo a communion, to find out what is going on in this world." If you're not willing to say that, what you get is entertainment instead of art, and poor entertainment at that."

The political impulse, similarly, must, however manifested, proceed from a universal urge to order social relations.

Superman comics are a fable, not of strength, but of disintegration. They appeal to the preadolescent, (sic) mind not because they reiterate grandiose delusions, but because they reiterate a very deep cry for help.
Superman's two personalities can be integrated only in one thing: only in death. Only Kryptonite cuts through the disguises of both wimp and hero, and affects the man below the disguises.
And what is Kryptonite? Kryptonite is all that remains of his childhood home.
It is the remnants of that destroyed childhood home, and the fear of those remnants, which rule Superman's life. The possibility that the shards of that destroyed home might surface prevents him from being intimate- they prevent him from sharing the knowledge that the wimp and the hero are one. The fear of his childhood home prevents him from having pleasure.
He fears that to reveal his weakness, and confusion, is, perhaps indirectly, but certainly inevitably, to receive death from the person who received that information.
[...]
Far from being invulnerable, Superman is the most vulnerable of beings, because his childhood was destroyed. He can never reintegrate himself by returning to that home- it is gone. It is gone and he is living among aliens to whom he cannot even reveal his rightful name.

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.

The good causes of the Left may generally be compared to NASCAR; they offer the diversion of watching things go excitingly around in a circle, getting nowhere. Page 11.

God, we are told, always answers our prayers, but sometimes the answer is no.

After the conflagration, in the final years of humankind, the artists will, once again, be found painting the ceilings of the caves, and the middlemen will, as always, be trying to talk the honest hunters out of their kill. And it may or may not then be remembered, or indeed believed, there was once a time when the two groups were inextricably linked.

Fuck the machine? FUCK THE MACHINE! What is this, courtesy class? You're fucked, Rick.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether this nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long survive. (A. Lincoln.) But we are not met upon a battlefield of that war. The battlefield for the culture is, of course,

Somebody told you, and you hold it as an article of faith, that higher education is an unassailable good. This notion is so dear to you that when I question it you become angry. Good. Good, I say. Are not those the very things which we should question? I say college education, since the war, has become so a matter of course, and such a fashionable necessity, for those either of or aspiring to to the new vast middle class, that we espouse it, as a matter of right, and have ceased to ask, “What is it good for?” (Pause)

It's called a confidence game. Why? Because you give me your confidence? No. Because I give you mine.

"Art has no chance of making the world "more just" than politics has of making it more beautiful."

I point back in the living room, back to the sideboard. I didn't fucking know there was a sideboard there!

The audience wants to be piqued, to be misled, to be disappointed at times, so that it can, finally, be fulfilled. The audience therefore needs the second act to end with a question.

in this great land, found his crouched, finger-pointing yentism merely the performance of a deeper truth and moral imperative, reducible to “stop working, tax the productive until they stop working, and let the country go to hell.