David Mamet's Reading List

"She was the first of the great Hollywood screenwriters, and in it from the days of the silents."

"She started in journalism before writing for silents, and wrote many of the great women's pictures of early sound."

"a roman a clef about a thug and criminal who comes to Hollywood, and becomes a great director."

"which is a laugh a minute, but one must read between the lies"

"Great dialogue — in novels, drama, on the street corner, or at the barbershop — adheres to our consciousness and shapes our understanding of the world. If you appreciate great dialogue, read some of George Higgins’ novels. He was a 1970s state and federal prosecutor before he became a Homeric chronicler-inventor of the language of the cops, crooks, and shysters of Boston."

"The dialogue in True Grit is exquisite. Portis was inspired, I believe, by the work of Andy Adams (1859–1935), an actual cowpuncher, who wrote the best fiction of the frontier. Read Adams’ The Log of a Cowboy and A Texas Matchmaker , both novels of the trail drive, for a visit to Reconstruction Texas."

"Lewis’ Wolfville series also must have inspired the great Mr. Portis. Wolfville is a fictional trail town, peopled by gunfighters, gamblers, cowmen, and whores. If you like to laugh, you will love these books."

"Finally, for dialogue (or anything else for that matter), one cannot top the perfection of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin books and the historical-military romances of Steven Pressfield, which are just flat-out delightful. Consider the character of the Assyrian sutler who attaches himself to the Spartans en route to Thermopylae in Pressfield’s Gates of Fire . He prefaces his utterances with an Ionian-accented ‘Weck up to thees!’ — meaning ‘Wake up to this!’ — to my taste, the literary equiv..."