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" For me, I need to fully immerse myself in a script to the point where I'm literally locking myself away for weeks at a time and I just write it. So I can write twelve to fifteen hours in a day, with breaks in between, obviously, but I need to just sort of live within the world of the script. "

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" 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. "

Terence Winter

People

Think

Behavior

" 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. "

" 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'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

" 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. "

" Any abhorrent behavior is more interesting to me. I'm always amazed when somebody asks me, 'Why don't you write something about nice people?' Because nice people are boring, that's why. "

Terence Winter

Nice

Interesting

" 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'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. "

" J. Edgar Hoover very famously denied the existence of organized crime up until the Appalachian Meeting, I think, in 1957. It was interesting to me that he clearly had to know that there was such a thing as organized crime and organized criminals as far back as the '20s. "

Terence Winter

Know

Interesting

" TV is a level playing field, and you're competing for eyeballs. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" I tend not to read reviews; there's too much out there in cyberspace. "

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

Terence Winter

Who

Absurd

" 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. "

" We may live like saints, but when it comes to our fantasy life, everybody's got a little larceny in their soul. "

Terence Winter

Live

Life

" I think that 'Vinyl''s faster-paced. I think 'Boardwalk' was much more luxurious in its storytelling. "

" In TV, writers generally are the show runners, and they have enormous control over everything. In feature films, very often the writer will turn in a script and never be heard from again. "

" 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 was a big fan of the show 'Deadwood' on HBO, which was created by David Milch. And as soon as I heard that all of those characters on Deadwood were based on real people, the first thing I did was Google everybody. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I've always thought that when they say ignorance is bliss, the converse to that is that knowledge is hell. The more you know, the bleaker things can get. "

" 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. "

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

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

" I was in the equity-trading department at Merrill Lynch. I was there in 1987 when the market crashed. "