Quotes from David Milch

Faulkner speaks to us on the questions of race, the challenges of modernity, and modern man's dilemma in all of its aspects. That he is able to specify among those and bring those themes alive is one of his great gifts. There are so many different kinds of pleasures one gets from encountering those materials.

I've been beaten. I know what that's like. They say, 'Who has been a nail can learn to be a hammer.' So I know what it is to beat people.

If you have a horse that can beat horses worth $20,000, typically you enter it in a $20,000 claiming race. Now there might be people who feel their horse is worth $20,000, and they say, 'I wouldn't mind seeing the horse get beat.' So they'll enter it for $40,000 so the horse looks like it's performed badly.

When I was growing up, it was not the heyday of the western.

The paradox is that money never meant anything to me. And it still doesn't, except now as an occasion for regret in that there are things that I want to make sure my family is protected when I pass.

Learning to live with the given is the great humbling educational process of life.

I remember when I was reading 'The Bear,' I was reading as a kid. All these years later, one returns to that for an entirely different reason.

Faulkner wrote for film, and his ear is just impeccable.

I am kind of an undecipherable commodity to a lot of people, including myself.

I had the erroneous conviction that all of history tended toward my birth and would diminish into chaos or inconsequence after I was gone. When you realize that's not so, the proper humility is to defer.

A syndicate is a group that has gotten together to pool their money so they can cover more contingencies. If I come to track with, say, $200, and I join a syndicate of 20 people, each of whom can bet $200, we can spread our bets, and that gives us a better chance of winning.

My relationship with the track was, I would say, at least fractionally as complicated as my relationship with my old man. So it kept me coming back.

When I was a kid, my dad used to take me out to the race track, and so many formative experiences have to do with associations like that.

Most races are claiming races. For the lower-caliber horses, it's a way the track has of forcing people to run their horses at approximately the price at which they would not mind having the horse bought.

The predicate of modern medicine is, 'We invalidate your humanity, but we give you immortality, so you have to shut up and listen to us.'

That's the definition of love, that going out in spirit to a separate and other soul and being received similarly.

Even having all the time in the world, it's better to collaborate with your brothers and sisters. It's ultimately the richest experience.

The idea of the western, I believe, as people conceive of it, is really an artifact of the Hays Production Code of the '20s and '30s, and it has really nothing to do with the West and much to do with the influence of middle-European Jews who had come out to Hollywood to present to America a sanitized heroic idea of what America was.

With 'Nostromo', Joseph Conrad said that he had wanted to write a novel about the degradation of an idea. That's what we wanted to show in the case of Dustin Hoffman's character, Bernstein.

What cops are hired to do is to control people who will not abide by the social contract.

The truth is I try to show up each day available to do the work that God or whatever it is that's making, you know, the solar system work wants me to do. And I expect when he wants me to stop, I'll be the first to find out.

You want to harbor your resources and try not to make a mistake.

What part of 9/11 is big? If the future continues to reinterpret the past, it could be argued that 9/11 provides irrefutable proof that unless there is some other way that we learn to deal with our technology or deal with our brothers and sisters, it is goodbye as a species. That genie does not leave that bottle.

My process is very disempowering to the director anyway, so it's essential that you be respectful. Once we've sort of found the scene, I have to get out of there, because you don't want to split the actor's idea of who's in charge.