A Criminal

INTERVIEWER

If you hadn’t found the theater, what do you think you might have been?

MAMET

I think it’s very likely I would have been a criminal. It seems to me to be another profession that subsumes outsiders, or perhaps more to the point, accepts people with a not very well-formed ego and rewards the ability to improvise.

https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1280/david-mamet-the-art-of-theater-no-11-david-mamet