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" I was always interested in the 1920s and the gangster world, in general. "
Terence Winter
World
General
Gangster
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" 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. "
Terence Winter
Ideas
Say
You
" 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. "
Terence Winter
World
Money
Violence
" 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. "
Terence Winter
You
Paint
Humanity
" First and foremost, you want to be truthful as a storyteller. "
Terence Winter
Storyteller
Truthful
Want
" 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
Me
Interesting
" I've had ideas for romantic comedies, but it would be a much more darkly comic version than what usually sells tickets. "
Terence Winter
Ideas
Comic
Than
" 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. "
Terence Winter
Time
Need
Focus
" 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. "
Terence Winter
Television
Look
Interesting
" 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. "
Terence Winter
Knowledge
You
Ignorance
" I wrote for 'The Sopranos' and worked on big, blustery characters for quite a while. "
Terence Winter
Characters
While
Wrote
" 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. "
Terence Winter
Think
Sing
Know
" 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. "
Terence Winter
Control
Turn
Everything
" 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. "
Terence Winter
Show
Important
You
" 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. "
Terence Winter
Speak
Tongue
People
" 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. "
Terence Winter
Morning
Conversation
Early
" Critics who do the weekly recap, I find that kind of absurd. That's like reviewing chapters in a novel. "
Terence Winter
Like
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.' "
Terence Winter
Everything
Pressure
Nothing
" I was in the equity-trading department at Merrill Lynch. I was there in 1987 when the market crashed. "
Terence Winter
Market
Department
Crashed
" My favorite thing to write is people under pressure in high-stakes circumstances. "
Terence Winter
Write
People
Circumstances
" 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
Like
Life
" 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. "
Terence Winter
Business
Sad
People
" To get to work with my idol, Martin Scorsese, has just been lovely - the highlight of my career. "
Terence Winter
Lovely
Career
Idol
" The first rule of show business is get off the stage while people still want more. "
Terence Winter
Business
More
Off
" 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. "
Terence Winter
Life
Evil
You
" 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. "
Terence Winter
History
Will
Suit
" 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. "
Terence Winter
Audience
You
Way
" Nothing about Tony Soprano's life was glamorous. He was never somebody I wanted to be. His life was terrible. "
Terence Winter
Never
Nothing
Life
" 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
Me
" People talk about the plots and what happened, and they see your tricks a mile away. "
Terence Winter
Your
Away
People
" 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. "
Terence Winter
Myself
Time
World