{"author":"David Mamet","author_id":"David+Mamet","total_quotes":34,"quotes":[{"text":"Society functions in a way much more interesting than the multiple-choice pattern we have been rewarded for succeeding at in school. Success in life comes not from the ability to choose between the four presented answers, but from the rather more difficult and painfully acquired ability to formulate the questions.","author":"David Mamet","tags":["life","success"],"id":2596,"author_id":"David+Mamet"},{"text":"The leaf of the camomile, parboiled in water, conduces to calm. And yet I do not worship it.","author":"David Mamet","tags":["religion","worship"],"id":46887,"author_id":"David+Mamet"},{"text":"If I could go back would I do it differently? Well, I can't go back.","author":"David Mamet","tags":["regret","reminiscence"],"id":64295,"author_id":"David+Mamet"},{"text":"Kraus asks the question of Freudian analysis: What would be enough? At what point would talking about one’s problems for x hours a week, be sufficient to bring one to a state of “normalcy”?The genius of Freudianism, Kraus writes, is not the creation of a cure, but of a disease—the universal, if intermittent, human sentiment that “something is not right,” elaborated into a state whose parameters, definitions, and prescriptions are controlled by a self-selecting group of “experts,” who can never be proved wrong.It was said that the genius of the Listerine campaign was attributable to the creation not of mouthwash, but of halitosis. Kraus indicts Freud for the creation of the nondisease of dissatisfaction. (See also the famous “malaise” of Jimmy Carter, which, like Oscar Wilde’s Pea Soup Fogs, didn’t exist ’til someone began describing it.) To consider a general dissatisfaction with one’s life, or with life in general as a political rather than a personal, moral problem, is to exercise or invite manipulation. The fortune teller, the “life coach,” the Spiritual Advisor, these earn their living from applying nonspecific, nonspecifiable “remedies” to nonspecifiable discomforts.The sufferers of such, in medicine, are called “the worried well,” and provide the bulk of income and consume the bulk of time of most physicians. It was the genius of the Obama campaign to exploit them politically. The antecedent of his campaign has been called Roosevelt’s New Deal, but it could, more accurately, be identified as The Music Man.","author":"David Mamet","tags":["politics","psychology"],"id":74227,"author_id":"David+Mamet"},{"text":"Conservatives believe in smaller government and in the power of the electorate. So I think that we're less likely to try to use a dramatic forum to warp people's political views.","author":"David Mamet","tags":["power","believe","political "],"id":74952,"author_id":"David+Mamet"},{"text":"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.","author":"David Mamet","tags":["good","speak","people "],"id":123825,"author_id":"David+Mamet"},{"text":"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.","author":"David Mamet","tags":["love","work","lazy "],"id":139139,"author_id":"David+Mamet"},{"text":"My greatest fear is that the audience will beat me to the punch line.","author":"David Mamet","tags":["me","greatest","audience "],"id":159839,"author_id":"David+Mamet"},{"text":"The poker player learns that sometimes both science and common sense are wrong; that the bumblebee can fly; that, perhaps, one should never trust an expert; that there are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of by those with an academic bent.","author":"David Mamet","tags":["science","fly","earth "],"id":163198,"author_id":"David+Mamet"},{"text":"I understand that computers, which I once believed to be but a hermaphrodite typewriter-cum-filing cabinet, offer the cyber literate increased ability to communicate. I do not think this is altogether a bad thing, however it may appear on the surface.","author":"David Mamet","tags":["cyber","understand","think "],"id":163312,"author_id":"David+Mamet"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":34,"pages":4,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}