“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.’

“I like to stay in my room. I have an office and I go there every day and write. 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, excerpted from “Mamet Talk” by Lillian Ross, The New Yorker 05.19.2008.

Fire extinguisher diagram from United States Patent 7188679.