David Mamet Quotes

I like playwriting because it's rooted in a single location with actors standing talking to each other.

I tried writing a novel, but plays were the thing that kept feeding me, asking me to come back, sit down and be with them.

If you pick up an eighteenth-century play, at the top it says 'The Argument,' and then you have a list of characters, and then you have the play. I was just always struck by that - that, of course, good drama is about conflict.

In theatre, you learn the story is more important than the actor.

I'm not interested in story lines or trash-talk.

Whether you're writing a horror show or a James Bond film, I think what bubbles beneath is interesting characterization. The colors that emerge through storytelling is what a dramatist does. There's always got to be something bubbling underneath that will erupt at some point.

I write my plays to create an excuse for full-tilt acting and performing.

Whenever you can manoeuvre your characters into a situation where they both have a good argument to make, you're on the right track.

One of the tricks to writing great plays is to get people in a room together and not let them leave. You want the tension to escalate. Keeping them there is the hardest part, so you have to take away any excuse for them to leave.

Drama is action, sir, action and not confounded philosophy.

The one overall structure in my plays is language.

I've learned that in the theater the story is everything. Every lyric, every line and every musical gesture has to propel the journey of a given character or the overall plot.

The hardest thing is to write a play, because you have to hold their attention for two hours, and if you let them go for five minutes, they're gone for good.

It's hard to tell writers, especially in movies, that words are secondary. Behavior is important.

I wish I could remember how to write a play. I can't remember how they happened.

I would like to write a play.

When I first started, I didn't really know how to structure a play.

Storytelling, in print or speech, needs vital energy.

The roles I'm interested in or have been interested in, you know, it's going to get down to conflict. Drama is conflict - conflict of interests.

I really think if you take away a character's obstacles then there's no comedy.

I like people to be surprised by the turn of events. I don't want things just to be pat and formulaic. If there's some sort of internal combustion in the character or a desire to change the way things are going, that makes for conflict, which is the essence of drama.

The drama is complete poetry. The ode and the epic contain it only in germ; it contains both of them in a state of high development, and epitomizes both.

This is the story, this is your character, I have the sense of the landscape, I have the sense of the scene, I have all that stuff. But I'm also looking for something else to happen, an accident or something. You're focused on the story you intend to tell and then you have to have a peripheral net out to catch these accidents.

In a good play every speech should be as fully flavored as a nut or apple.

I'm not a playwright.