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" During seventy years of TV, the audience came to feel that the rules are, you can't kill the second lead on your TV show! Whatever's going to happen, it's all okay because there's no way they can kill the star. "

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" I'm not exaggerating when I say 'Taxi Driver' was the movie that stopped me in my tracks. That was the first time it got me thinking about movies. "

Terence Winter

Time

First

" The first rule of show business is get off the stage while people still want more. "

Terence Winter

Business

Off

" I'm not really gangsta. Not at all. I just write about them. It's fun to pretend, at least on paper. But in real life, not so much. "

" It's challenging, in a way, but if you depict anyone with all the colors of human emotion and show those moments - with their families, with their children - the worst of us have elements of real humanity. "

" I think people, whether they realize they're doing it or not, seek out distractions to take their minds off what they know is bad behavior. "

" I'm not interested in someone's credits. Let me see who you are, and tell me a story of your life. "

" I was always interested in the 1920s and the gangster world, in general. "

" One FBI agent told us early on that on Monday morning, they would get to the FBI office, and all the agents would talk about 'The Sopranos', having the same conversation about the show, but always from the flip side. "

" I have a rule: I will not alter the basic history of a real-life character to suit our fictional needs in a big way. "

" There's a certain type of person drawn to the gangster world, and they're generally young men who were predisposed to violence and risk-taking, who like to make a lot of money quickly and wear flashy clothes. "

" Does 'Jersey Shore' make me sad for humanity that this is what's passing for entertainment? Well, this is a business, and if that's what millions of people want to watch, I can't fault someone for producing it. "

" If I hear an interesting turn of phrase on TV, I'll repeat it back - I just like to roll it around on my tongue. The same goes for dialog: I'll either speak it aloud or whisper it. I definitely sit in front of my computer and mutter. People have mentioned it. "

" When Prohibition was first enacted in 1920, most people stockpiled alcohol, thinking they'd have enough to last them for years. By 1923, that was starting to run out, so your average person started to rely more and more on criminals. "

" I wrote for 'The Sopranos' and worked on big, blustery characters for quite a while. "

" I'm always amazed by writers who say, 'Oh you know I had a half hour so I sat down and wrote a little bit.' I just need a real big chunk of time to sit down and focus. That's my process. "

" It used to be that you had to do a certain number of episodes to hit syndication in order to try to keep a show on, because it's important to the network because it sells good commercial time. That's really not how HBO does things. "

" My favorite thing to write is people under pressure in high-stakes circumstances. "

" Any distraction tends to get in the way of being an effective gangster. "

" If you lose your house and your life savings to a broker, you'd probably throw them in the same category as the worst gangsters in history. Everybody's definition of carnage and evil is different. "

" I think I sing a few songs, and I sing them well, and one of them is the mob genre, you know, as a writer. "

" As a writer, I've tried to avoid strong opinions about morality. You just want to present things as they are and let the viewer come to their own conclusion. "

" I look at the feature films that come out, and by and large, 85 percent of them are things I wouldn't in a million years sit down and watch. The more interesting storytelling is happening on television by a long shot. "

" If you're truly depicting human behavior in an honest way, it is a lot of miscommunication, non-communication, paranoia, passive aggressiveness. People don't finish sentences. They don't say what they mean. They lie to each other. They take credit for things that are actually other people's ideas. "

" Critics who do the weekly recap, I find that kind of absurd. That's like reviewing chapters in a novel. "

Terence Winter

Who

Absurd

" There's nothing funnier for me than taking two characters and throwing them into a pressure cooker and letting them turn on each other. Especially if they already tend to be loud, aggressive, alpha types. That's sort of everything from 'The Honeymooners' to 'Goodfellas' to 'The Sopranos.' "

" Very often at the end of 'The Sopranos' you get the feeling that its not under control, you should be very worried, and life is kind of really, really messed up at lot of times. It leaves you feeling very disconcerted. That was kind of the point of it. "

" Nothing about Tony Soprano's life was glamorous. He was never somebody I wanted to be. His life was terrible. "

" People talk about the plots and what happened, and they see your tricks a mile away. "

" The thing is, when you paint somebody in all of their colors, they're never all bad or all good. Even the worst person has humanity in there somewhere. "

" I've had ideas for romantic comedies, but it would be a much more darkly comic version than what usually sells tickets. "