Quotes from David Milch

I have several different masks that I wear.

I'm no rose. I have been around a while, and you never know when something is going to be the last thing you do.

What constitutes - where are we when we sleep? What is our sense of reality at that moment? It's, you know, science now suggests to us that what has been perceived as matter for a long time is, in fact, energy.

There is not an amount of money that a writer can earn that I can't blow.

In college, I started to get soaked in the materials. Subsequently, I worked with R.W.B. Lewis, Robert Penn Warren, and Cleanth Brooks on a history of American literature - I did that for seven or eight years. In the course of that work, my interest in Faulkner deepened and has been sustained ever since.

I try to do the story the way I feel the story should be done, and how that folds into whatever larger sorts of categories or questions is really none of my business.

Apes beat their chests so they don't have to fight 24 hours a day.

Ego suppression can be an act of ostentation.

Every man's entitled to hope.

And if God were trying to reach out to us, and teach us something about the deepest nature of matter, he might use some drugged-out surfers.

Pain or damage don't end the world. Or despair, or fucking beatings. The world ends when you're dead. Until then, you've got more punishment in store. Stand it like a man... and give some back.

Announcing your plans is a good way to hear god laugh

learned late in life to obey my wife's commands without question, but even though I learned I only do it intermittently. I live in terror of her judgments but I rarely take the next step of following her instructions. In my consciousness my wife is a brooding, metaphysical omnipresence who has saved my life.

offer myself to Thee to build with me and do with me as Thou wilt. Relieve me of the bondage of self, that I may better do Thy will.

It increasingly seems that life is something that happens to you and art the opportunity to understand what's transpired. You need only to be brave.

I'm not saying I'm wealthy. The best thing that ever happened to me in that context was turning everything over to Rita. And the business people. I am on a leash. That's not the end of the world.

For a long time, I felt that was actually the best I could ever hope for - to pretend to be a good person - because I was quite the opposite.

As a writer, I don't have a sense of my own position. I try to disappear and not to think of myself at all when I'm working.

When someone is good at what he does but is a nonconformist, there is a temptation in horse racing, like in all kinds of other areas of human endeavor, to dismiss him for his nonconformity rather than to recognize him for his excellence.

In any operation, what you have to do is to persuade the patient to grant access to the patient's energy. The purest form of that is when you're trying to help a woman through labor: when you're saying, 'Push, push!' and you're rhythmically with the woman.

Time will tell whether I am a wing nut or a megalomaniac. The difference between a cult and faith is time.

Someone asked me, 'How long do you intend to do 'Deadwood'?' And part of my sociopathology, I say, 'Well, when does my contract run out?' And I realize my contract ran out at the end of four seasons.

It's kind of an intuitive process. I wish that it were more systematic, but it just isn't.

Showbiz and churches are the same thing. You never saw 'The Wizard of Oz?'