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

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" First and foremost, you want to be truthful as a storyteller. "

" 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. "

" With an interesting character, there's always something to say. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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.' "

" 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. "

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

" 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 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'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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "