David Mamet Quotes

Being really good at 'learning how to learn,' as President Bill Brody of Johns Hopkins put it, will be an enormous asset in an era of rapid change and innovation, when new jobs will be phased in and old ones phased out faster than ever.

Above all, it's never blind chance: it's a chance that is always planned, but also always surprising. And I need it in order to carry on, in order to eradicate my mistakes, to destroy what I've worked out wrong, to introduce something different and disruptive. I'm often astonished to find how much better chance is than I am.

We embark unhesitatingly on the path, in a direction that is absolutely right and urgent, supported by everyone, in the knowledge that this path is but a learning process... We have to keep on learning, creating, applying, by-passing, touching upon, refining and clarifying a number of notions and details that need to be improvised and applied and which, thank God, we cannot foresee. The only rigidity lies in our will, our conviction that we are on the right road and that our initiatives are most pressing.

The quest for certainty in forecasting outcomes can be the enemy of progress.

You've got to jump off cliffs and build your wings on the way down.

If you're doing something radically new, you need a team that's willing to go on a ride that's very different from anything they've encountered before.

The more experience I get, the more I know to relax and let go of things because there's so much that is out of your control. So much needs to happen to get a film made nowadays and star power doesn't even matter anymore. So, me being what I am, I have to realise that to an extent.

Anyone who says failure is not an option has also ruled out innovation.

In this speedy world of ours when facts are multiplying rapidly and giant rearrangements are happening all around us, it seems dangerous to be made nervous by the new - to want what we can never have, to want things not to be rearranged. It would be better to be able to take the leap, which is to be able not only to live with change and newness, but even to help make it.

The metaphor that I frequently use for entrepreneurship is jumping off a cliff and assembling an airplane plane on the way down.

For every role, you have to always find a different way to approach it, one that's specific and suits what the key is. Every role's a mystery. I think if you know what it is, you probably shouldn't even do it.

Keep everybody guessing as to what your next trick is going to be. Don't become too predictable.

In a world that's changing so quickly, you're guaranteed to fail if you don't take any risks.

I never want to feel like the way that I see it isthe only way. Sometimes mistakes happen and that's better than whatyou thought the scene could be. You allow room for the possibilities.

The future belongs to those who learn more skills and combine them in creative ways.

You have to adopt a mindset that says, 'Okay, in three months, I'll need to know all this stuff, and then in six months there's going to be a whole other set of things to know - again in a year, in five years.' The tools will change, the knowledge will change, the worries will change.

Embrace what you don't know, especially in the beginning, because what you don't know can become your greatest asset. It ensures that you will absolutely be doing things different from everybody else.

People who need certainty are unlikely to make good entrepreneurs.

If a totally new image is to come into being however, there must be sensitivity to internal messages, the image itself must be sensitive to change, must be unstable, and it must include a value image which places high value on trials, experiments, and the trying of new things.

You're at your best when you don't know what you're doing.

We are comfortable with formulas, but the best happens when the formula doesn't work.

We can no longer stand at the end of something we visualized in detail and plan backwards from that future. Instead we must stand at the beginning, clear in our mind, with a willingness to be involved in discovery... it asks that we participate rather than plan.

Get yourself in trouble. If you get yourself in trouble, you don't have the answers. And if you don't have the answers, your solution will more likely be personal because no one else's solutions will seem appropriate. You'll have to come up with your own.

Being mystified is a good beginning, because you won't do what you've done before.