David Mamet Quotes About Writing

Quotes about: Writing

• Don't write stage directions. If it is not apparent what the character is trying to accomplish by saying the line, tell us how the character said it or whether or not she moved to the couch isn't going to aid the case.

  David Mamet

  Writing, Character, Theatre

  David Mamet (1986). “Writing in restaurants”, Viking Adult

• Get into the scene late; get out of the scene early.

  David Mamet

  Writing, Scene, Late

  David Mamet (1991). “On Directing Film”, Penguin Group USA

• The subject of drama is The Lie. At the end of the drama THE TRUTH -- which has been overlooked, disregarded, scorned, and denied -- prevails. And that is how we know the Drama is done.

  David Mamet

  Drama, Lying, Writing

  David Mamet (2013). “Three Uses of the Knife: On the Nature and Purpose of Drama”, p.87, Vintage

• Any time two characters are talking about a third, the scene is a crock of s***.

  David Mamet

  Writing, Character, Talking

• Anyone can write five people trapped in a snowstorm. The question is how you get them into the snowstorm. It's hard to write a good play because it's hard to structure a plot. If you can think of it off the top of your head, so can the audience. To think of a plot that is, as Aristotle says, surprising and yet inevitable, is a lot, lot, lot of work.

  David Mamet

  Writing, Thinking, Play

• Freud believed that our dreams sometimes recapitulate a speech, a comment we've heard or something that we've read. I always had compositions in my dreams. They would be a joke, a piece of a novel, a witticism or a piece of dialogue from a play, and I would dream them. I would actually express them line by line in the dream. Sometimes after waking up I would remember a snatch or two and write them down. There's something in me that just wants to create dialogue.

  David Mamet

  Dream, Writing, Play

• The audience will teach you how to act and the audience will teach you how to write and to direct. The classroom will teach you how to obey, and obedience in the theatre will get you nowhere. It’s a soothing falsity.

  David Mamet

  Writing, Theatre, Classroom

  David Mamet (2011). “True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor”, p.19, Vintage

• The true writer must write not the acceptable but the true.

  David Mamet

  Writing, Acceptable

  David Mamet (2008). “Bambi vs. Godzilla: On the Nature, Purpose, and Practice of the Movie Business”, p.72, Vintage

• IF YOU PRETEND THE CHARACTERS CANT SPEAK, AND WRITE A SILENT MOVIE, YOU WILL BE WRITING GREAT DRAMA.

  David Mamet

  Drama, Writing, Character

• I tend to write a lot, which I think is the secret to being prolific.

  David Mamet

  Writing, Thinking, Secret

• It's hard to write a good play because it's hard to structure a plot. If you can think of it off the top of your head, so can the audience.

  David Mamet

  Writing, Thinking, Play

• A play is basically a long, formalistic polemic. You can write it without the poetry, and if you do, you may have a pretty good play. We know this because we see plays in translation. Not many people speak Norwegian or Danish or whatever guys like Ibsen spoke, or Russian - yet we understand Chekhov and the others.

  David Mamet

  Writing, Play, Long

• It's hard to write a good plot, it's very hard.

  David Mamet

  Writing, Plot, Hard

• Writing a novel is an incredibly free experience. One puts one's self in a narrative mode. You can go off in any direction - the past, the future, or go laterally, or include one's own beliefs. It's total freedom.

  David Mamet

  Writing, Past, Self

• I used to think I'd like to be a fireman - in fact, I still would - and the only drawback I could see was coming back to the firehouse, after a day of fighting fires, and still having to put in an eight-hour day writing.

  David Mamet

  Writing, Fighting, Thinking

  "Mamet Talk" by Lillian Ross, www.newyorker.com. May 19, 2008.

• You can't write about history without writing about politics at some point. History is about movements of people. 'What is criminality and what is government' is a theme that runs through every history.

  David Mamet

  Running, Writing, Government

  "TheDC Interviews: David Mamet talks War". Interview with Patrick Howley, dailycaller.com. December 27, 2013.

• If you're writing an opinion piece, it's your job to write your opinion. If, on the other hand, you wrote a novel, as Virginia Woolf tells us, it would be inappropriate if you let your novel be influenced by your political opinions.

  David Mamet

  Jobs, Writing, Political Opinions

• In playwriting, you've got to be able to write dialogue. And if you write enough of it and let it flow enough, you'll probably come across something that will give you a key as to structure. I think the process of writing a play is working back and forth between the moment and the whole. The moment and the whole, the fluidity of the dialogue and the necessity of a strict construction. Letting one predominate for a while and coming back and fixing it so that eventually what you do, like a pastry chef, is frost your mistakes, if you can.

  David Mamet

  Mistake, Writing, Thinking

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