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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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'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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" One of the nicest things I ever read about our show was that a critic felt 'Boardwalk Empire' could be the beginning of the blur between television and cinema, because the production values are so high and the storytelling is so compelling. "

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

" To get to work with my idol, Martin Scorsese, has just been lovely - the highlight of my career. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" I started with the book 'Boardwalk Empire' and then immersed myself in the history of Atlantic City, World War I, the temperance movement, Prohibition, pop culture. I even read the news and magazines of the period just to soak in it. That was before I even started thinking of the story. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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.' "