Old age and treachery will always beat youth and exuberance.
David Mamet
I grew up in a tough neighborhood and we used to say you can get further with a kind word and a gun than just a kind word.
Always tell the truth - it's the easiest thing to remember.
It's only words... unless they're true.
People may or may not say what they mean... but they always say something designed to get what they want.
I love working on a typewriter - the rhythm, the sound; it's like playing the piano, which I do, too.
What I value most in my friends is loyalty.
The surprise is half the battle. Many things are half the battle, losing is half the battle. Let's think about what's the whole battle.
Liberalism is a religion. Its tenets cannot be proved, its capacity for waste and destruction demonstrated. But it affords a feeling of spiritual rectitude at little or no cost.
I look back on my liberal political beliefs with a sort of wonder - as another exercise in self-involvement - rewarding myself for some superiority I could not logically describe.
The so-called assault weapons ban is a hoax. It is a political appeal to the ignorant. The guns it supposedly banned have been illegal for 78 years. Did the ban make them 'more' illegal? The ban addresses only the appearance of weapons, not their operation.
My idea of perfect happiness is a healthy family, peace between nations, and all the critics die.
My greatest fear is that the audience will beat me to the punch line.
A good film script should be able to do completely without dialogue.
Every reiteration of the idea that nothing matters debases the human spirit.
A liberal pretending to be a conservative? That's like a straight person pretending to be gay to get greater acceptance.
There's no such thing as talent; you just have to work hard enough.
The main question in drama, the way I was taught, is always, 'What does the protagonist want?' That's what drama is. It comes down to that. It's not about theme, it's not about ideas, it's not about setting, but what the protagonist wants.
American football seems to resemble soccer in that one scores by putting the ball through the opponent's goal; but football, truly is about land. The Settlers want to move the line of scrimmage Westward, the Native Americans want to move it East.
We Americans have always considered Hollywood, at best, a sinkhole of depraved venality. And, of course, it is. It is not a protective monastery of aesthetic truth. It is a place where everything is incredibly expensive.
We respond to a drama to that extent to which it corresponds to our dreamlife.
One person may need (or want) more leisure, another more work; one more adventure, another more security, and so on. It is this diversity that makes a country, indeed a state, a city, a church, or a family, healthy. 'One-size-fits-all,' and that size determined by the State has a name, and that name is 'slavery.'
I've been alienating my public since I was 20 years old. When 'American Buffalo' came out on Broadway, people would storm out and say, 'How dare he use that kind of language!' Of course I'm alienating the public! That's what they pay me for.
My dad was an immigrant kid and a Democrat and a Jew, and we didn't know any Republicans in our group. So I grew up Democratic. My dad was a labor lawyer - a very hardworking guy, a one-horse labor lawyer - and then I went to hippie college and lived in the bubble.
Here's what happens in a play. You get involved in a situation where something is unbalanced. If nothing's unbalanced, there's no reason to have a play. If Hamlet comes home from school, and his dad's not dead and asks him if he's had a good time, it's boring. But if something's unbalanced, it must be returned to order.
War is tragedy. The great war stories are tragedies. It's the failure of diplomacy. 'War and Peace,' 'A Farewell to Arms,' 'For Whom the Bell Tolls.' Those are some of the greatest tragedies.
Roll back the clock, and every possession of every great country started with a crime.
Art and mass entertainment and propaganda, they can all be plotted on the same graph, but there is a difference.
Each culture has its own form of staged combat, evolved from its particular method of street fighting and cleaned up for presentation as a spectacle, e.g. savate, Cornish wrestling, karate, kung-fu.
I'm afraid of only two things: being lazy and being cowardly.
Films have degenerated to their original operation as carnival amusement - they offer not drama but thrills.
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.
Obama is a tyrant the same way FDR was a tyrant. He has a view of presidential power that states: the government is in control of the country, and the president is in charge of the government. He's taken an imperial view of the presidency.
People ask me, 'What do you do?' And I tell them I'm a writer, but always with the silent reservation, 'I am, of course, not really a writer. Hemingway was a writer.'
In a world we find terrifying, we ratify that which doesn't threaten us.
I've always been more comfortable sinking while clutching a good theory than swimming with an ugly fact.
It is not the constitutional prerogative of the Government to determine needs.
It's hard for a Jew of my generation, an American Jew, who is philo-Zionistic, not to romanticize Israel.
Movies were never an art form, they were entertainment. It just evolved into an art form from there, and it's still evolving in different ways.
I've always been fascinated by the picaresque.
I'm afraid of only two things: being lazy and being cowardly. I get up early in the morning and go to work. I love to write.
I love all insider memoirs. It doesn't matter whether it's truck-drivers or doctors. I think everybody likes to go backstage, find out what people think and what they talk about and what specialised job they have.
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.
I'm not the guy to ask about politics. I'm a gag writer.
A stage play is basically a form of uber-schizophrenia. You split yourself into two minds - one being the protagonist and the other being the antagonist. The playwright also splits himself into two other minds: the mind of the writer and the mind of the audience.
Being among my people is a delight. We Jews live among ourselves. I love it.
My definition of a 'friend' is, coming from Chicago, someone who says, 'Yeah, sure. You know what? Let's talk about what we can talk about. Let's help each other out. Your politics are none of my business.'
The honest man might observe... that no one gets something for nothing; that politicians go in poor and go out rich; that the Government screws up everything it touches; and that the Will to Believe is best confined to the Religious Venue, as to practice it elsewhere is just too damned expensive.
People only speak to get something.
When the three branches of government have failed to represent the citizenry and the mass of the media has failed to represent the citizenry, then the citizenry better represent the citizenry.
