David Mamet can be a hard playwright to love, especially for those who have met him. But despite the difficulty of some of his plays, and his notoriously prickly persona, Mamet has become a bona fide icon. Still, he can’t resist playing the victim: “I think basically people hate artists,” he says. “They observe or they intuit that the artist is having a great time, that the artist doesn’t have to work, that the artist gets the girls, the boys, the adulation, the money. And it’s true. Once a studio executive or a journalist does that math, they are, of course, enraged.”