David Mamet Quotes

I went to film school at Columbia and did that for a couple years, and really thought I was going to be a filmmaker, and then I kind of drifted over to the acting side after that.

I went to Los Angeles for acting, and I thought that's where I wanted to go, and I found out that I didn't belong there.

I am going to branch out to acting and do more modeling.

I'd always wanted to be on Broadway one day, but it seemed like a dream that might be unattainable. This business has a lot of ups and downs and I learned that pretty quickly.

I don't have any desire to ever act again full time.

I was a film student. I became an actor, but I thought I'd be pursuing filmmaking originally.

It wasn't that I left acting; it's just that I put it aside while I set about becoming a comic.

My dad was a theater actor, so he had an agent, and he brought me into his agency when I was maybe four years old. That was how I started. I started modeling, and it progressed from there.

I originally started off as a healer before I came to Hollywood.

It can be tough as a jobbing actor.

I just stepped off the show biz bus and changed gears.

When I came back into show business in '88 after spending 20-odd years in the civil service, it wasn't planned.

I decided to take a stab at acting. I entered the American Academy of Dramatic Art, where one teacher told me I'd never make it - I was too tall.

My mom and dad were actors when they were younger and had a horrible experience of it. My dad became a literary agent and my mom a casting director.

I did 'Degrassi' for five years in Toronto, and I made the decision to quit the show to go to theatre school, which a lot of people thought I was really crazy to do, but it was one of those major decisions in my life that I haven't regretted - hopefully I won't! I really wanted to go to school.

Once I started working as a professional actor, it was like, 'Bye-bye waiting tables, bye-bye bartending, bye-bye all the cliched jobs actors do.' But after a year of not getting work, there's this really difficult conflict, like, 'Do I have to go back to being a waiter when people recognize me from a show?'

Eventually, I went to college to study psychology, but I was getting more and more TV roles, so I thought, 'You know? It's kind of like psychology, but a little more selfish.' I took a break from school, moved to L.A., and never went back.

Telling parents in New Jersey you want to act isn't exactly like telling them you want to be a doctor or a dentist. There are no guarantees. It's hard, but all the arts are. Can you imagine the pain of writer's block?

I like to work. I mean, part of it for me is that I was a struggling actor, could barely pay my rent, until I was almost 40.

I used to be a wonderful auditioner. When I was living in New York, I'd audition every day. And I like to audition. But then it got to a point where I didn't like it anymore.

I had started out my grown-up life in New York City, but I couldn't figure out how to be an actor there. And so I had been a magazine illustrator instead.

Even the first suitcase-off-the-train moment, it's easy to be discouraged, frustrated, annoyed, angry. Because you're waiting in freezing weather outside of an open call, and you're like, 'This moment of me right now is not the joy I felt when I was doing J. Pierrepont Finch in 'How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying' in high school.'

I was a musician for years before I started doing this stuff. Show business was the only thing I ever considered.

It's 90 percent rejection, being an actor.

In 2006, I made the decision to go after my dream. I was living in Atlanta and had a promising career in marketing, but I took a leap of faith and decided to move to New York, enroll in graduate school, and pursue acting.