David Mamet Quotes

If I fail all the time, it must be that I think of myself as a failure. If I do not want to think of myself as a failure, perhaps I should begin by succeeding now and again. Look. The tests, you see, which you encounter, in school, in college, in life, were designed, in the most part, for idiots. By idiots. There is no need to fail at them. They are not a test of your worth. They are a test of your ability to retain and spout back misinformation. Of course you fail them. They’re nonsense. And I …

JOHN: You said “Good day.” I think that it is a nice day today.

CAROL: Is it?

JOHN: Yes, I think it is.

CAROL: And why is that important?

JOHN: Because it is the essence of all human communication. I say something
conventional, you respond, and the information we exchange is not about the
“weather,” but that we both agree to converse. In effect, we agree that we are both
human.

Justice is the application of previously decided and accepted norms of conduct and the rules for their examination and dispute.

Many of us, and most of us from time to time, try to escape a blunt fact which may not tally with our self-image. When we are depressed, we re-create the world around us to rationalize our mood. We are then likely to overlook or misinterpret happy circumstances.

"...My dad, may he rest in
peace, taught me many wonderful things. And one of the things he taught me was never ask a guy what you do for a living.

He said "If you think about it, when you ask a guy, what do you do you do for a living," you’re saying "how may I gauge the rest of your utterances." are you smarter than I am? Are you richer than I am, poorer than I am?"

So you ask a guy what do you do for a living, it’s the same thing as
asking a guy, let me know what your politics are before I listen to you so
I know whether or not you’re part of my herd, in which case I can nod
knowingly, or part of the other herd, in which case I can wish you dead.

You stupid fucking cunt. Williamson! I'm talking to you shithead! You just cost me $6,000. $6,000, and one Cadillac. That's right. What are you going to do about it? What are you going to do about it...asshole? You fucking shit! Where did you learn your trade, you stupid fucking cunt?! You idiot! Whoever told you that you could work with men?! Oh, I'm gonna have your job, shithead. I'm going downtown, I'm going to talk to Mitch and Murray! I'm going to Lemkin! I don't care whose nephew you are...who you know...whose dick you're sucking on, you're going out! I swear to you, you're going out! Anyone in this office lives on his wits. I'm going to be with you in a second. What you are hired for, is to help us. Does that seem clear to you? To HELP us. Not to FUCK US UP! To help men who are going out there to try to earn a living, you fairy. You company man. I'll tell you something else, I hope you ripped the joint off, maybe I can tell our friends here a little something that might help him to catch you. You want to learn the first rule you'd know if you'd ever spent a day in your life? You never open your mouth til you know what the shot is. You fucking child.

The audience can endorse the triviality of modern art, but they can’t like it.

All drama is about lies. All drama is about something that’s hidden. A drama starts because a situation becomes imbalanced by a lie. The lie may be something we tell each other or something we think about ourselves, but the lie imbalances a situation. If you’re cheating on your wife the repression of that puts things out of balance; or if you’re someone you think you’re not, and you think you should be further ahead in your job, that neurotic vision takes over your life and you’re plagued by it until you’re cleansed. At the end of a play the lie is revealed. The better the play the more surprising and inevitable the lie is. Aristotle told us this

Kraus asks the question of Freudian analysis: What would be enough? At what point would talking about one’s problems for x hours a week, be sufficient to bring one to a state of “normalcy”?

The genius of Freudianism, Kraus writes, is not the creation of a cure, but of a disease — the universal, if intermittent, human sentiment that “something is not right,” elaborated into a state whose parameters, definitions, and prescriptions are controlled by a self-selecting group of “experts,” who can never be proved wrong.

It was said that the genius of the Listerine campaign was attributable to the creation not of mouthwash, but of halitosis. Kraus indicts Freud for the creation of the nondisease of dissatisfaction. (See also the famous “malaise” of Jimmy Carter, which, like Oscar Wilde’s Pea Soup Fogs, didn’t exist ’til someone began describing it.) To consider a general dissatisfaction with one’s life, or with life in general as a political rather than a personal, moral problem, is to exercise or invite manipulation. The fortune teller, the “life coach,” the Spiritual Advisor, these earn their living from applying nonspecific, nonspecifiable “remedies” to nonspecifiable discomforts.The sufferers of such, in medicine, are called “the worried well,” and provide the bulk of income and consume the bulk of time of most physicians. It was the genius of the Obama campaign to exploit them politically. The antecedent of his campaign has been called Roosevelt’s New Deal, but it could, more accurately, be identified as The Music Man.

Art is an expression of joy and awe. It is not an attempt to share one's virtues and accomplishments with the audience, but an act of selfless spirit.

In the sixties, the Commune emerged as a riposte to the nuclear family. This was an autonomic re-creation of not only preindustrial, but pre-agrarian life; it was the Return to Nature, but the Commune, like the colleges from which the idea reemerged, only functioned if Daddy was paying the bills, for the rejection of property can work only in subvention or in slavery. It is only in a summer camp (College or the hippie commune) that the enlightened live on the American Plan — room and board included prepaid — and one is free to frolic all day in the unspoiled woods.

Society functions in a way much more interesting than the multiple-choice pattern we have been rewarded for succeeding at in school. Success in life comes not from the ability to choose between the four presented answers, but from the rather more difficult and painfully acquired ability to formulate the questions. Page 28

Well, to the law, you’re an accessory. Before the fact.

Accepted nowhere, belonging nowhere, The Human Ant is forced to roam the world, half-ant, half-cow.