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

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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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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 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 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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.' "